The Bandi are a humanoid race who inhabit the planetDeneb IV. Their technology is not particularly advanced, and their architecture is surprisingly simple.
During the mid-24th century, a group of Bandi captured an injured spaceborne entity and brought it to the surface of Deneb IV. The Bandi nourished the lifeform back to health, but kept it only strong enough to use its unique ability to change energy into matter. Too weak to leave the surface, the creature was imprisoned on the planet and forced to manifest itself as Farpoint Station.
In the year 2364, the lifeform's mate came to Deneb IV to free it, attacking the nearby "Old Bandi City". This attack lead the crew of the USS Enterprise-D to realize the nature of Farpoint Station and give aid to the injured creature, allowing it to rejoin its mate in orbit of Deneb. (TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint")
David Gerrold wrote a TOS story premise, prior to selling "The Trouble with Tribbles", involving a non-sentient, vaguely ursine, empathic telepath whose influence became a danger to the ship. "Bandi" was both the name of the creature and the title of the story. The premise was reproduced in Gerrold's The Trouble With Tribbles non-fiction Star Trek book; commenting on it in that book, he explained that the name was intended to be somewhere between "Bambi" and "banshee," suggesting a cute menace. There is no evidence one way or the other on whether the Bandi of Deneb IV were named after the creature in the story premise; however, Gerrold was involved in the early development of TNG, and did write the novelization of Encounter at Farpoint. Gerrold wrote a story titled "Bandi" in the third volume of the Star Trek Manga, "Uchu".
