My current WiFi situation on Location works for me at the moment.
As I shoot, a couple of seconds after hitting the shutter, the images come up on my iPad screen. I can immediately see which images have hit their focus and are nice and sharp without unwanted motion blur.
I can get a better overall view of the scene on the iPad so I don’t have to spend hours fixing something in Photoshop that I missed on the tiny LCD on the back of the camera. I can just see it and fix on set before taking another shot.
As I’m planning to turn the CubieTruck into a portable backup storage device for use on location, I thought “What if I could transmit via WiFi to the Cubie (or Raspberry Pi) instead of the iPad?”
At the moment, there’s not much point, as the SanDisk Eye-Fi card only allows the transfer of JPG files, and backing those up is useless to me, as JPGs get deleted at the end of the session anyway.
I can do this with the Nikon D200 & WT-3 grip (via FTP), but not with the Eye-Fi card, as they don’t offer any Linux support at all.
I have, however, found a solution.
It took a little figuring out to set it up, but once on the CubieTruck, as long as I don’t have the Eye-Fi software running on my iPad, a few test shots on the camera sent straight over to the CubieTruck after a little initial negotiation. The first image took a couple of minutes, but after that, it took just a few seconds after each shot to appear in the browser.
As I said, JPG is useless to me beyond sending them over to the iPad, so it looks like I’ll be picking up the Eye-Fi Pro X2 at some point (which offers RAW transfer), where I’ll go through the whole setup process here on the blog.
Regardless, I thought I’d post this one up for now, just so anybody else interested would have somewhere to look with software that seems to work.
And it seems to work very well, I’ve configured it to put the files in /var/www/eye-fi/[eye-fi-mac-address]/, so that I can load them up on any other machine on the network via a browser.
Once I pick up a Pro X2 and I’m only transferring RAW files, I’ll use ExifTool or ImageMagick to extract the JPG previews automatically as each file goes across for browser viewing, and write up a few quick PHP scripts to auto-refresh and show the latest image.
Posting these here for future reference.
exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw orignal.NEF > output.jpg
and in ImageMagick
convert image.nef image.jpg
More conversion tips on this page.
There is also this, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
http://returnbooleantrue.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/eye-fi-standalone-server.html
I went with the other one first so I could have a compiled binary, and wouldn’t have to mess around with python scripts.