How many printers can I connect?

The numbers of printers you can use is based on your plan. See Pricing for more information. This section is more concerned with how many printers can be physically connected to the nodes.

Practical limits

The short answer

The short answer is that you can reliably connect around 10-15 printers per node.

The long answer

The long answer is that even though on most modern computers, the theoretical limit for the number of devices you can connect per USB host controller is 127, the practical limits are usually lower due to several factors.

The node you're connecting your printers too will likely not have that many ports and so a USB hub will likely be required. Each USB port can only supply a limited amount of power. For that reason it's recommended to use one that has it's own power supply. Using the Raspberry Pi for example you may be able to connect a 7 port USB hub to each of the 4 built-in USB ports totalling 28 printers per node. However depending on your workload you may want to reduce this to the recommended amount mentioned above.

All devices on the same controller share bandwidth, which can limit performance when too many printers are connected. We recommend that you experiment with this yourself so that you're not under-untilising hardware that more printers can be connected to and so you're not over-utilising it meaning that prints are affected as the time it takes to stream G-Code over serial is increased.