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Wireless Digital Photography Digital cameras and memory cards are fantastic – no more worrying about the cost of film, the cost of developing and printing . . . you can shoot to your heart’s content. But then you have to “upload” all those photos to your computer. What if you didn’t even have to do that – they just appeared on your PC all by themselves? T ouch wood, the Nikon digital cameras we use for all photography at SILICON CHIP haven’t given us a moment’s trouble. But the memory cards have. We’ve gone through a few over the past few years, giving errors mainly due to physical damage. That damage has occurred primarily when the card has been ejected from the camera and placed in the computer card reader (or vice versa). And taking lots of pictures means doing that quite a few times for each “shoot”, checking the pics are what we want and so on. I don’t think I’ve been any more ham-fisted than the next person but a couple of cards have separated down their edges, another has simply ceased working (the computer knows it’s there but it sits there like blancmange). OK, one was my fault – I dropped it and trod on it! Fortunately, SD cards (and their variants, SDHC and MMC) are now much cheaper than they were even a couple of years ago. And they are much higher capacity as well. But being able to store a couple of thousand shots on the card is relatively immaterial when all I want to do is dash off a couple of couple of dozen pics and transfer them to our server, so they can be processed. I still have to take the card out of the camera, take it to my PC and insert it in the reader, wait for the computer to realise there is a “disk” there, find the appropriate folder and identify the photos I want, download the files, wait until it’s all finished until I can remove the card . . . and then remember to replace it in the Nikon ready for next time. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked around to our studio, set up By ROSS lighting and so on, gone to take a picture 14  Silicon Chip and . . . the dratted memory card is still in the computer! At least, that’s what I used to do. . . Now I simply take the photos. A short time later, the files automatically appear in a folder on the server, untouched by any human hands (or even animal hands). Enter the World of Wi-Fi Eye-Fi For a couple of years now, I’ve been trying to think of a simple way to avoid the problem of physically transferring cards. You might say that in the overall scheme of things, it’s not one of the most world-shattering problems. But it has been annoying enough to make me want to do something! I’d thought about another (networked) PC in the studio and use a USB cable to the camera – but certainly couldn’t justify that to the bean-counter-what-must-be-obeyed. I’d thought about sourcing (or making?) an SD card reader with its own IP address which could simply hang off the network. Nah, still too expensive and/or too much like hard work. I’d thought about a USB-to-Ethernet converter which could plug into the network. Ditto! I’d thought about much more but in the end decided that I was destined to keep doing what I had been doing – sort of like the “sneakernet” we all used before networks were the vogue. (Haven’t heard of a sneakernet? Where you took a floppy disk from one machine and walked around to another machine to share files etc? Oh, what’s a floppy disk?) Enough frivolity! Back to the subject at hand . . . It must be at least 18 months or so ago that I read a press release from the TESTER US about the release of an “Eye-Fi” SD siliconchip.com.au All it takes is a compatible digital camera (and there are lots of those), an Eye-Fi card and a Wi-Fi network – and you’re away! Card. What set my heartbeat racing was that it was not only supposed to do exactly what I had been searching for, it would do it wirelessly, right from inside the camera. Eye-Fi direct. Their website has an online store. There was a range of Eye-Fi cards but I was only after the simplest one, the Connect X2, which was $US49.99 Bewdy! Say again? Sorry. . . you can’t have one! The release went on to say that an Eye-Fi card could connect any SDHC-compatible camera (and that’s a huge number these days) to any Wi-Fi network and automatically transfer JPG or video files! But how? What is an Eye-Fi card? Believe it or not, they said that along with the normal memory chips and drivers, a tiny Wi-Fi transceiver (802.11b-g) was built inside the SD card. So the files were sent direct from the camera, to wherever you wanted them to go, provided there was a Wi-Fi network within range. Our network setup here at SILICON CHIP is probably not all that unusual and is relatively simple. It includes a permanently-on (albeit well hidden!) Wi-Fi access point so the Eye-Fi card should do exactly what we wanted. But expand this idea a little, say to someone travelling overseas and taking lots of photos. Sure they could use lots of cards (and risk losing them or damaging them) – but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to visit an internet café or wireless hotspot and send the pics home as soon as they were taken? Or perhaps someone in the real estate, insurance, or countless other industries who needs to take pictures on the run, then send them on to clients, to the office, and so on. Having found what appeared to be the perfect solution to my problem, the next step was obtaining an Eye-Fi card. First off, I had to wait until they were actually on sale (that was a few months) but then I set about buying one. So I went through the most likely channel and contacted But after I went right through the whole rigmarole of selecting and ordering, entering credit card details and so on, when I finally got to put the shipping address in . . . “Sorry, we do not sell outside the US and Canada”. Grrrr! I emailed Eye-Fi and got exactly the same short shrift. Nope, we don’t supply to Australia. The Eye-Fi website also lists quite a number of “partners”, so I thought it might be clever to go through them. Same story, “not allowed to supply to your address”. Looking further afield, Amazon, which said they had Eye-Fi cards available, finally told me that “licensing restrictions would not let them supply” me. OK, now it was getting to be a challenge. I thought “who do I know in the US or Canada?” but drew a blank there. On a hunch, I had a look on good ol’ eBay. Sure enough, there were several international suppliers offering Eye-Fi cards. The first one listed was one of those dealers I had tried off the Eye-Fi website. Scratch that one . . . Hmm! Another on-line retailer in Florida, USA, (walhab. com) but not one of Eye-Fi’s “dealers”, was offering genuine, guaranteed Eye-Fi cards on a “buy it now” basis, actually a couple of dollars lower in price than from Eye-Fi or their own dealers (which were all identically priced). So I put in my details, including Paypal . . . and presto: order confirmed, with 15-20 days delivery time. Murphy’s law determined that the day I ordered it exactly coincided with the Aussie dollar’s 2010 nadir but even siliconchip.com.au October 2010  15 with p&p, it came in under $AU60. Since we bought ours, Eye-Fi cards are now sold in USA/Canada, England, France, Germany and Japan. But still not in Australia! And another note: I searched walhab’s website but couldn’t find Eye-Fi cards listed – however, they are still selling them on eBay at time of writing (late August). My Eye-Fi card arrives It only took 12 days to arrive by post from the US and, being under $500, attracted no GST. Included were the Eye-Fi card itself, a mini instruction manual, plus an SD-to-USB card reader/adaptor, for those who might not have any SD/MMC slots on their PC. In fact, the card itself was already inside the reader. The instruction manual told me I needed 10 minutes(!), a PC running Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, a Wi-Fi network (along with access codes and passwords), broadband internet access (to register the software) and finally a camera, so I could test my first shots. By the way, apparently the Eye-Fi card can also be configured under Linux using eyefi-config, which allows viewing the logfiles and changing the wireless settings. To receive images from the card, there are two alternatives, Eyefi-server (in Python) and iiid (in C++). However, the UploadKey must still be defined from within Windows/ Mac for the first use. Plugging in the reader brings up the Eye-Fi folder, which in turn loads the Eye-Fi Helper software onto your PC. Once loaded, you’re prompted to remove the Eye-Fi card from your PC and plug it into your camera, then take a test photo and, of course, leave the camera turned on. Within a couple of minutes, a tiny Eye-Fi Helper window opens and you can see the files as they are transferred. With my picture files at about 4MB each, it takes the best part of a minute for each photo to upload but it does so in the background. As soon as a particular photo is uploaded, you can view and edit them with your normal photo software. It’s that simple! In my case, while the Eye-Fi Helper program runs on my PC, the files are actually stored on one of our network drives, a bulk photo repository if you like. The Eye-Fi Helper handled such changes with ease. You can add up to 32 Wi-Fi networks to the Eye-Fi card setup – of course, you’ll need any passwords and IDs just as you would for normal WiFi usage. I must admit I haven’t tried the Eye-Fi card out with other Wi-Fi networks (hotspots, etc) because I am only concerned with our particular setup. But the literature and reviews I’ve seen in recent months suggest there would be few problems there. Incidentally, earlier versions of Eye-Fi cards apparently couldn’t work with hotspots but I believe the latest versions can. What we received: the retail Eye-Fi pack contains the EyeFi card itself, a USB SD Card Reader (used for installing the software on your PC) and a brief multi-language instruction manual. are those generated by the camera itself, exactly as you would find on the SD card. Later model Eye-Fi cards have a feature called “Endless Memory” which automatically starts deleting the oldest, delivered files if the card starts to reach capacity. But with either 4 or 8GB capacity, most users will be waiting a long, long time for that to happen. Range is claimed to be up to 45m outside and 15m inside, although this would depend to a large degree on obstacles, building construction, etc – just as with any Wi-Fi signal. Of course, if the camera body was all metal, sealing the card inside, there would probably be no wireless range at all. Fortunately, the vast majority of today’s cameras (even upmarket ones!) are based on plastic construction. How does it work? Inside the card Like normal SD cards, the Eye-Fi card relies on flash memory to store image files and in exactly the same manner. But at the same time, a wireless transceiver built into the same card (including the antenna) logs on to an available Wi-Fi network (one whose details have also been stored on the card) and starts transmitting the files via the Wi-Fi network to a previously specified PC and/or directory. It automatically creates a sub-directory with “today” as its filename and saves the files to that. The photo filenames To look at, you’d never know the Eye-Fi card was any different from any other SD card. It’s exactly the same size – 32mm long, 24mm wide and 2.1mm thick. The card is manufactured for Eye-Fi by Wintec Industries Inc. in California and contains the following major components: • Atheros AR6001GL “Radio-on-a-Chip for Mobile” (ROCm) • Samsung Electronics K9LAG08-U1M NAND flash • Hyperstone S4 flash memory controller 16  Silicon Chip siliconchip.com.au The Eye-Fi helper logo on the task bar (top of screen) flashes when an image is transferring, while the image itself, with progress bar, appears at the bottom of the screen. The files automatically save into a directory (folder) with the label “today”. This automatically changes to the appropriate date (in dd:mm:yy format) when today becomes tomorrow. Or is that yesterday? • Epic Communications FM2422 compact RF front-end module • Fairchild Semiconductor FAN5350 step-down switching voltage regulator It’s impressive to see how all this functionality has been packed into the card, especially when you consider that it still has the flash memory. Incidentally, Eye-Fi was founded in 2005 by Yuval Koren, Ziv Gillat, Eugene Feinberg and Berend Ozceri. The last two gentlemen are believed to be the “brains” behind the Eye-Fi hardware. mean you lose anything. Taking the photos of the boat on last month’s cover was a case in point: it was about 20km away from the office but as soon as I returned, I turned the camera on and the photos started transferring immediately. Incidentally, you can select the level of privacy you want, to tell the Eye-Fi card which pics you want it to transfer; for example, just in case you’ve taken some holiday snaps you might not want Great-Aunt Maude back in Australia to see. Yes, I very much recommend the Eye-Fi card. Just a pity they make the thing so hard to buy! SC In use? It’s a dream! As I said at the outset, now I never have to remove the card from the Nikon (in fact, the first time I have had it out since new was to take the photos for this report!). It just happens . . . Just a couple of caveats: you have to remember to leave the camera turned on until the last of the photos has been transferred – after years of ensuring I turned the camera off to preserve battery life, that’s taken a bit of un-learning! Second, and you might say bleedingly obvious, mate, is that both the computer and Wi-Fi network must be turned on to enable transfer. But not having them on doesn’t Here’s a rather significant enlargement of one of the latest Eye-Fi cards, the Pro-X2. The large chip (lower left of the pic) is Samsung flash memory, just as you would find in any other SD card, with its driver chip alongside. Top left is a Marvell wireless transceiver, which supports 802.11 b/g/n. Top right is an Eye-Fi chip that manages the chip’s wireless networking and data transfer features. The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi antenna is integral within the card. siliconchip.com.au Current Eye-Fi Models (Note: “theoretically” available only in North America, Europe and Japan. Unless you try hard!) Eye-Fi Connect X2 With 4GB capacity, the Eye-Fi Connect X2 will automatically upload JPEG photos and videos to the computer and one of more than 25 online sharing sites, such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube or Picasa, through a Wi-Fi network. $US49.99. Eye-Fi Geo X2 – Similar to the Connect X2 but also offers lifetime, automatic Geotagging service to help you organise and share photos. View, search and share your latest trips on maps in iPhoto ’09. $US69.99 Eye-Fi Explore X2 – With 8GB of flash memory, Explore X2 also offers one year of hotspot access for uploading away from home through open hotspots. $US99.99. Eye-Fi Pro X2 – Unveiled at CES and winner of CNET’s “Best of CES” award, the 8GB Eye-Fi Pro X2 allows users to create an ad hoc connection directly to their computer to wirelessly upload photos and videos while away from a wireless router. Like Explore X2, Pro X2 offers lifetime geotagging and one-year of hotspot access to enable uploads away from home. $US149.99 More info? www.eye.fi – just don’t try to buy one from them! October 2010  17