Raspberry pi (or cluster) can handle how many printers for a farm?

diyengineer

Looking at using the repetier server pro software to start managing multiple printers. Whats an average guess to how many printers one pi can handle? I'm looking at starting a large farm, and just shopping around and crunching numbers. Also, could I make a raspberry pi cluster to run in excess 100 printers?

Thanks,

diyengineer

Repetier

Good question and the other one is how many should you handle with one instance even if you could do more.

The number greatly depends on what beside sending g-code is needed. Just a server sending g-code costs nearly no ram and cpu time, so I think you could handle 10 printers with one instance. Now if you add webcams that you watch you get a lot of web traffic and even ethernet interface (better forget wifi to slow and unreliable in professional use) you oinly have 100mbit.

The downside of handling too much printers is that if you need to restart or change something, you have to wait for all printers to finish and also a crash woudl affect more printers. So I personaly would maybe bundle 4 printers per pi. So you would use 25 Pis for 100 printers. Please also make sure PIs get enough power. They are very sensible to underpower.

diyengineer

Thank you very much for the help, and the tips. Looking to work more with you in the future.