Idea of this project is to get photos from digital camera (that supports only SD card as a storage media) to tumblr posts with NO human interaction (other then shooting photos) in a cheap way.
Only specific hardware requirement for this is SD card with WiFi capability. As the goal of this project is to do it cheaply - one of cheapest WiFi SD cards was chosen. XP gained in the process. Cheapest unbranded WiFi SD card adapters does not really work... well... they somewhat work... sometimes... and then they overheat, reboots, looses WiFi connection and so on. Another WiFi SD adapter we tested was ez Share. It also has that cheap feel to it and web interface is really basic. Yet we found ez Share adapter was working pretty good. Wifi distance was about 20m thru one wall and signal was pretty stable.
WiFi SD adapter creates and access point named ez Share with default password 88888888. After connecting you should be able to access web interface at http://192.168.4.1 . Please note that device running wifi-cam-poster should have access to internet for posting photos and to wifi sd card to download photos from at a same time. This can be done for example by your router, which could connect to both networks at a same time and forward SD cards port 80 to your default network. Or even better, you can run wifi-cam-poster on your router directly (not yet tested, should work theoretically).
wifi-cam-poster uses SD cards default web interface and can download photos from first page only at the moment. That defaults to 20 latest photos. Script saves lasts downloaded photo name (as stored on camera) to a local file to be able to detect availability of new photos. In case last downloaded file is not found on the first page, then all photos on the first page will be downloaded. Photos are downloaded in tar archives to preserve modification timestamp as set by camera itself.
While scripts tries to download photos ASAP, it is not always possible due to WiFi connectivity, range or other factors. Camera itself has a micro-SD card in the WiFi SD adapter for local storage so files are buffered there and may be downloaded any time camera is online for enough time for download to complete. Scripts will retry failed or interrupted downloads until they succeed, so there is no need for camera operator to take any actions or even know that files are being downloaded. Then local storage gets full, one can simply (assuming all photos is already downloaded) use cameras Format Card function.
Different cameras stores photos with different filenames. So to make photos management in local file system easier, script prepends every filename with date and time the photo was taken. This date/time is retrieved from JPEG metadata with fallback to files modification date.
For every downloaded photo a tumblr post is created and saved as draft. Posting is done via very easy to use tumblr php lib which uses tumblr API.
Just execute php build.php and that should download composer, get project
dependencies and build wifi-cam-poster.phar for you.
Execute ./wifi-cam-poster.phar in the new directory. This action should
generate a Config.php template in the same directory. Now you can fill in all
necessary fields in the config and launch program again. To log output to
syslog and put program to the background do something like this
./wifi-cam-poster.phar 2>&1 | logger -t wifi_videos &
Configuration at the top of get_videos.php file. Execute like this:
./get_videos.php 2>&1 | logger -t wifi_videos &
also you can prepend command with nohup so you may close terminal after
executing this command.
Downloaded videos will be stored in the same directory as the script.
Filenames will be as stored on camera, no modifications will occur.