Valhalla666

Did my research on Aliexpress now, looks like it's cheaper to buy a Chinese camera system than to make one yourself. If you make it yourself, you spend something around $10 for RPi W, $20 for camera, $5 for case, $35 for RPi B 3+ and $50 for all kinds of cords and chargers, so (10+20+5)*8 + 35 + 50 = $365 in total. You can get a Chinese 8pcs system form $260 to $350, all setup, with the power cords, ethernet cables, etc. So it's not only cheaper, but also less work and likely a better night vision quality.

Is it possible to setup a 8-cam 1080p 10fps system with night vision like that, or am I better off getting one of those chines CCTVs sets? I think it might be possible. Using this calculator, 1080p @ 10fps in high quality H.264 will result in 4Mbps video stream, which Zero Pi should be able to handle. Even if the webcam USB and the Wi-Fi share the same bus, the 8Mbps combined (4Mbps from cam and 4Mbps to Wi-Fi) sounds like a reasonable amount of bandwidth that Zero Pi should be able to handle. So there should be no issue with Zero Pi. Now, the hub server needs to be able to receive 4Mbps from all 8 Zero Pis, so 32Mbps, as well as to write those 32Mbps to hard drive. Optionally, it also could allow viewing live feeds through the web interface, which would add to at most 32Mbps. So 32Mbps (or 64Mbps) wifi/ethernet network and 32Mbps USB hard drive. Can Raspberry Pi B 3+ handle this? Also the CPU / RAM load required for all this by the Motion Eye server hub software.