ZoneMinder Forums

Hi, I'm looking to implement a monitoring solution for a 3D printer workshop with ~40 printers of different makes.

Cost is a factor, so I'm thinking of having 10 raspberry pis, each with 4 desktop USB webcams connected (desktop webcams are small and light so can be easily mounted to the printers).

I'd like to have one 'main' server that users can visit and see a montage of all the cameras in one go.

There is no need for any recording functionality - all that's needed is live feeds.

Is this possible with ZM? I've read the multi-server docs but I can't immediately tell if it will be possible to view all the live streams on one montage page.

Many thanks!

The Multi server setup is aimed at spreading the CPU load for processing the camera's you wish to monitor.

Accessing each of the servers within this setup will allow you to view a montage covering all of the camera's. There are limitations on how many cameras can be viewed at once in montage view, resolution, CPU performance, Network bandwidth to name a few. No point having 100's of cameras on screen if the resolution is so low you can't see what's happening.

Not sure though that a RPi will be powerful enough to run very well with 4 USB cameras attached.

I'm aware that there might be performance issues, but I'd like to try it out -- if one pi can't run four cameras, I'll try it with two, and if it can't do two then I'll try it with one -- the important thing is that we want a single webpage (which i expect to run on a decent spec server) that can see all the cameras at once.

Framerate really isn't very important - this is just to allow people working remotely to see if their print has failed or not.