Talos Screen Monitor

Tiny Electron app that captures all connected displays once per second, skips identical frames, and uploads new ones to Hetzner Storage Box. Designed for unattended runs on a relative's PC.

Features

• Captures every connected screen each second (multi-monitor aware)
• Skips frames identical to the previous capture (per-screen MD5 hash)
• Uploads to Hetzner Storage Box (u561540.your-storagebox.de:23, SFTP) at /home/screen_monitoring/<name>/<YYYY-MM-DD>/screen<n>/<HHMMSS>.png. Visible over SMB at \\u561540.your-storagebox.de\backup\screen_monitoring\... (the SMB path is /backup, the SFTP path is /home — same files, different chroot).
• First-launch name prompt; subsequent launches auto-record
• Tray icon — close button hides, doesn't quit
• Built with screenshot-desktop (no external ffmpeg dependency) + ssh2-sftp-client

Build (cross-compile from Mac → Windows)

cd tools/screen-monitor
npm install
npm run dist:win

Output: dist-electron/Talos Screen Monitor-0.1.0-x64.exe (NSIS installer, ~80–100 MB).

electron-builder builds Windows NSIS installers from Mac without Wine. Tested with the same toolchain that produces the talos label-printer desktop app.

Run

Double-click the installer → installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\talos-screen-monitor\ → launches.

First launch: enter the user's name (saved to %APPDATA%\talos-screen-monitor\config.json). After that the app auto-records on launch and you only ever interact with it via the tray icon.

Storage layout

/home/screen_monitoring/   (SFTP path — over SMB this is /backup/screen_monitoring/)
  Ahmet/
    2026-05-04/
      screen0/
        15-32-07.png
        15-32-12.png
      screen1/
        15-32-08.png
  Mehmet/
    ...

Sizing

At 1 fps, 1080p PNG, dual screen, ~70% dedup over an 8h work day:

• ~150–250 MB / day / user
• ~3–5 GB / month / user
• Storagebox has 1 TB; comfortable for many users for many months.

Notes

• Uploads are async and queued — capture loop never blocks on network. If Hetzner is unreachable, frames stay in %APPDATA%\talos-screen-monitor\frames\ and flush on reconnect.
• Quit only from the tray context menu; closing the window hides it.
• SFTP credentials are baked in (same as office backup). If you want a per-user sub-account on the storagebox, ask.