ZoneMinder Forums

Hello,
I'm developing a monitoring camera based on Raspberry Pi. I was looking for a frontend to use with my camera and thus discovered ZoneMinder.
The concept I'm trying to implement with my camera is to use the RPI HW capabilities and therefore to do as much as possible processing inside the camera device. Moreover, the camera device itself decides how and when to contact the "external world" in order to push the images to be secured.
The camera device owns what you mean in your architecture description ZMC, ZMA and something like ZMF.

My proposal is to add flexibility to ZoneMinder in order to integrate with open camera devices. I call "open" a camera whose firmware in open to required evolutions. The goal is to have a:
- Zone Minder server (similar to the current one).
- Zone Minder embedded (hosted on the camera device).
- Zone Minder client (Mobile app and / or web view as the current solutions).

I would like to know your feeling about this kind of evolution. Of course, in case you're interested by my proposal, I'm ready to help with design, developing, testing...

Please let me know if you need more information.

Kind regards,

The good news is that the Raspberry Pi bcm2835-v4l2 driver already makes use of the raspberry pi's gpu, and ZoneMinder has direct support for local v4l devices. Using the Raspberry Pi camera would be the most efficient option, but usb cameras and even ip cameras would work as long as you stay within the limits of the hardware.

Now, in order to turn that into a system with multiple cameras, you can enable multiserver:
http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/sta ... erver.html

The diagram shown is intended for large enterprise environments, but multiserver will also work in a micro server environment where each "server" is a single camera attached to a single raspberry pi. This achieves what you are looking for.

If you want to make it an embedded system, then create a special build on a read only filesystem.

Be advised, multiserver is a very new feature and only works on the local lan. Today, it is not practical to get it to work through a firewall, but a vpn would work.

Note that ZoneMinder already has an app, zmNinja, so you could just use that.