BPI-R1 wont power up

That's a bad sign. At this stage not that much power hungry stuff happens so it might be bad DRAM. You could try to use an OS image that relies on boot0 (the Armbian image you use is based on u-boot what might lead to a different DRAM initialization) but I've no idea where to find that.

But I doubt it will help since normal u-boot output would look like:

U-Boot SPL 2016.05-armbian (Jun 08 2016 - 23:09:46)                                                                                                                     
DRAM: 1024 MiB                                                                                                                                                          
Trying to boot from MMC1

So when not even the amount of DRAM is detected I would fear the worst (the output above is from a more recent u-boot since I'm creating an OS image for BPi M2+ and since this an incompatible H3 board u-boot output for the old A20 based Bananas might look different. Anyway: this here is the wrong place to ask technical questions, better try it in linux-sunxi IRC or Armbian forum)