[tetha]

In most cases I've seen scales similar to this - body cams in security, scanners at postal services and such, the physical part is offloaded to the individuals working with the thing: at the end of the day, you put your thing into a charger, or into a box and connect it up or something like that.

So from there, my thought is indeed: Why shouldn't we get 1000 micro sd card readers (or multi readers), attach those to a bunch of PIs streaming the cards to a central server, have people put their SD card in there at the end of a day? After that, you can kick off the reads in a batch, re-seat the cards that aren't set correctly and that's it.

One could reduce hardware cost by having some LED turn on or off if a card in a reader can be swapped, but with a thousand people doing this, complicated instructions tend to be a bad thing. Unless the transfer is fast enough to wait for it.

But it's always fun how complicated some of these physical problems become if you scale them up. Like, consider how many storm drains are out there in a city. If each needs to be touched once every 3 years... suddenly you've created a dozen jobs.