One Board for an 8-Camera Site: The Interceptor as Switch, Recorder, and Storage

A typical small camera site, like a dental office, a storefront, or a storage facility, looks something like this:

A PoE switch for the cameras. An NVR or a small server to record them. A few drives. Power bricks and patch cables tying it all together. It works, but it’s three boxes doing a job one board could do.

The Exaviz Interceptor is that board. The Interceptor Carrier Board holds a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, five SATA drives, and a 4-port Gigabit switch. Add one Interceptor PoE Board and you have 8 PoE+ camera ports. Your recording software runs on the Compute Module, right next to the ports that power the cameras.

What’s on the board

Interceptor Carrier Board v2.0:

• Raspberry Pi CM4 (full support), Raspberry Pi CM5 (supported, with the limits noted below), or Banana Pi CM4. The compute module is sold separately.
• 5x SATA III (6 Gbps), hot-plug, with RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, or 10 in software (mdadm)
• 4x Gigabit Ethernet through a managed switch (one WAN uplink and three LAN ports by default)
• 2x HDMI 2.0, 4x USB 2.0, RS-485, a micro SD slot, and an RTC with battery backup
• Standard 24-pin ATX power

Interceptor PoE Board:

• 8x PoE+ ports (IEEE 802.3at, up to 30W per port). 802.3af devices work too.

Why one board

• Fewer boxes. The switch, the recorder hardware, and the storage go in one 1U case.
• Your VMS, your OS. It runs standard Raspberry Pi OS with Exaviz’s Debian packages. It’s full Linux, so you pick the recording software.
• No cloud in the middle. Nothing needs an Exaviz account. For remote access, you use the VPN you already run.
• Cameras get addresses right away. Each PoE port gets its own DHCP-served subnet.

Plan before you order

The PoE board runs on 48V from the 48Vdc Power Converter, which supplies up to 240W. That’s enough for 8 ports at 30W, and a basic IP camera draws about 5 to 8W. With PoE boards installed, use a 350W or larger supply. In the 1U case, that’s a Flex ATX unit.

The PoE ports run at 10/100 Mbps and deliver power in Mode B, so each camera run needs a standard 8-wire Cat5e or Cat6 cable. The 4-wire cables bundled with some consumer NVR kits won’t work, and 802.3bt (PoE++) isn’t supported.

The Pi doesn’t boot from SATA, so boot from eMMC or an SD card and keep the drives for recordings. With a CM5, the front-panel button doesn’t power the board on, and you flash the CM5’s eMMC on a separate Raspberry Pi IO Board.

The port count is a design spec, not a measured stream count. Size your VMS, bitrates, and drives for the site, and test on your own hardware before a customer install.

Setup outline

1. Seat the CM, then connect the PoE board to J9 with the FFC cable. Lock the clips before you power on.
2. Wire the converter from the PSU’s 4+4-pin CPU connector to the PoE board’s terminal block. Never hot-plug 48V.
3. Mount everything in the 3HDD 1U case.
4. Flash Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit), then install exaviz-dkms, exaviz-pse-dkms, exaviz-netplan, and exaviz-poe-tool from apt.exaviz.com.
5. Build the RAID array, plug in the cameras, and check that each port is delivering power with exaviz-poe-tui.
6. Install your VMS.

Parts list

What you’ll need: Interceptor carrier + PoE board, a CM4/CM5, the 48Vdc converter, a 350W+ power supply with a stable +3.3V rail, SATA drives, an SD card or eMMC for boot, 8-wire cable for each camera, 802.3af/at cameras that work at 100 Mbps, and your VMS.

We’re also building Exaviz Management, a dashboard that runs on the board itself with no cloud account. More soon. Want to hear when it’s ready? Sign up for announcements.

Both boards are in stock now: the Interceptor Carrier Board v2.0 and the Interceptor PoE Board. Documentation at exa-pedia.com.

Designed by our team in Noblesville, Indiana. NDAA Section 889 (self-attested). Assembly outside China is available on request for customers with country-of-origin requirements.