Hacking the eye-fi to keep your data home
The eye-fi is pretty sweet. However, the built in client connects to the eye-fi manager, which hands off your data to the eye-fi servers. In order to keep my data home, I had to cut out the manager. Using the afore mentioned python script to act as an agent on my ubuntu server, I added in a call to gup – a python based command line gallery2 uploader. The script would probably suffer from performance over a choked internet pipe, but I’ve got a local gallery2 install on the same server. Now I can take photos, they’re immediately uploaded to the server via EyeFiServer.py. Each time EyeFiServer gets an image, it calls gup.py and uploads the image to an ‘incoming’ gallery on my server. It’s a bit of a rube goldberg, but it works really well.
Now I can take a photo, and within 10 seconds or so, it’s been added to my personal Gallery2 server – ready for storing, sorting and editing.
You can grab my modded version of the EyeFiServer here.
« Eye-fi: handy for the lazy geek
New (old) server for the house »
Comments
Comment from Daniel
Time: March 23, 2009, 12:40 pm
I’ve heard the eye-fi can’t transfer raw images (.CR2) etc. With this server, can you remove that restriction?
Comment from Erik
Time: March 25, 2009, 9:05 am
Hey, I saw Jeff’s code back in Feb. Here’s my dilemma, how do I use it? I have both a Mac (OS X) and a PC running Vista (32-bit). I’d like to get this running on my two main machines, but have never used Python. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Comment from itfrancel
Time: June 19, 2009, 4:36 pm
I would like to know if there is a way to use this card as a wireless NAS, even thou its quite small it would be great to be able to copy data to it wirelessly. I have a good size digital frame that i would like to make wireless, Do you think there is a way to make it run samba or any way I can dump my images/ files to it wirelessly thanks
Comment from Mike
Time: July 16, 2009, 9:20 pm
Excellent! I hate sending any data that I dont have to, into “the cloud”.
Comment from Kali
Time: November 27, 2009, 2:12 am
Is it at all, possible to hack this card to use the wifi module to receive wifi signals in devices such as… oh, I don’t know, let’s say a Palm Treo 700P PDA cell phone?
It’ll be awesome if this card can be hacked and turn into some sort of wifi card for use with older mobile phones that didn’t come with the built-in wifi.
Comment from Vegard
Time: February 10, 2010, 10:24 pm
Is there any way you could use the eye-fi to accept data that’s not photos and send it where you want it to sent it. Let’s say I connected a device on the door to my house. And if someone opened the door the device has a eye-fi card that will send a message to my home computer that in turn would send and email and notify me.
If you know of any ways I can get the eye-fi to work for me like this, please contact me.
by the way, the door example is just a random idea.. I have endless ideas of how to use the eye-fi technology.
Hope to hear from you.
Comment from waltbosz
Time: March 17, 2010, 8:01 am
@Vegard : I really haven’t done any research into how the EyeFi cards transfer their data, but if I had to venture a guess, I would say that there is software running on the card that watches for new JPEG files, and once one is found the card transfers it via the wifi link. The manufacturer sells different levels of cards that give you different features. The cheapest card can only transfer JPEGs, but other ones can transfer video and RAW files. The cards appear to have writable firmware, so I would think that if EyeFi wanted to they could enable video & RAW transfers on any of their cards. They don’t really have an incentive to do that or else no one would buy the more expensive cards. It’s a little lame because older cameras can’t handle a card greater than 2GB, and the video & RAW feature is only available on higher capacity cards.
Anyway … getting back to your question about sending non-photo data. I don’t think you could use the card as a wifi antenna for sending any old data stream … but I’d guess that if you were to put the card in a SD card reader and write a JPEG file to the card, it would interpret that as a new photo and transfer the file over wifi. If that works, you could then piggyback other data onto the photo in the EXIF data in the JPEG. I don’t know how much data validation the EyeFi card does, it might even transfer a text file with a .JPG extension.
Now, this is really a lot of work to transfer some wireless data. You might want to check out the XBee products. They’re designed for wireless projects. http://www.digi.com/products/wireless/point-multipoint/xbee-series1-module.jsp
Pingback from Photography with Open Source / Linux | Worldlabel Blog
Time: September 1, 2010, 10:34 am
[...] brand SD cards, which add WiFi connectivity to inexpensive digital cameras. Eye-Fi hacks include direct upload (as opposed to funneling photos to a user account managed by Eye-Fi) and a host of other tricks; [...]
Comment from Andrew
Time: March 16, 2009, 3:25 am
Outstanding! My wife is a photographer and this would be very useful for her at her studio.