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Hardware Technology

Automated Wireless File Transfers? 39

Posted by Cliff from the making-complicated-tasks-easy dept.
Maskirovka asks: "I'm in the process of designing a helicopter mounted compact flash reader/transmitter package to upload photos to a fileserver upon landing, probably using 802.11g. It needs to be idiot proof (ie, plug a flashcard into it, and it'll upload automatically as soon as it gets in range of the basestation), and should weigh less than 5 pounds so as not to affect the aircraft weight and balance. It could probably be built around a Via EPIA board using a PCI WiFi card and riser, but that almost seems overkill for the one specific task. Is there a more efficient way to do this with off the shelf hardware?"
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Automated Wireless File Transfers? More

Automated Wireless File Transfers?

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  • Let me pop-up an answer (Score:5, Funny)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @10:40PM (#6971211) Journal
    Is there a more efficient way to do this with off the shelf hardware?

    Get a wireless X-10 camera, and mount it on your helicoptor. Then a model-quality blonde who wears nothing other than bikinis will move in next door, digging out a pool in one doesn't yet exist, and spend her entire life lounging by the pool, moving only in order to keep herself centered in the lens of your camera.

    It's all true, I saw it in a pop add. And another pop-up add, and another pop-up add, and then in a pop-up add.

    <script language="ECMAScript"> window.open("http://www.x10.com/annoyingflashingad ", scrolbar='no', closable='no', alwaysontop='yes', believable='no');</script>
  • What are you DOING?!

    I can only imagine some sort of cloak and dagger digital image exchange with a gratuitous amount of trenchcoats.

  • scripting & openbrick (Score:5, Informative)

    by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @10:43PM (#6971229) Homepage
    Here's a quick suggestion

    1) Get OpenBrick (www.openbrick.org)
    2) Install Linux w/ ftp server
    3) Use heartbeat to monitor your box on board
    4) when available, copy data from OpenBrick with either ftpcopy or mirroring software of your choice
    5) ???
    6) Profit

  • Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @10:50PM (#6971283) Homepage
    Try using a charcoal pencil and a sketch pad.
    Just before landing fold the image into the traditional paper aeroplane shape.
    As you approach the base station launch the image.
    The pilot may have to do some tricky flying to direct the rotor wash so that the image reaches the base station.

  • You could get a Soekris 4501 or other box from www.soekris.com, strip it down to just board, find a way to power the board. All the specs for the boards are located on Soekris' site.

    From there, you could create a script that listens for when you put a CF card in. Don't ask me how to do that, I don't know a lick of any type of program language, scritping language, or just plain language.
    • Couldn't one use an automount daemon and an entry in one's fstab to automatically mount the memory card to a drive and at that point launch a script that does an rsync, scp or CIFS file transfer to the destination server?

      There is an article [daemonnews.org] on Daemon News that can help with running a script using the pccard support in FreeBSD to initiate a script to copy files from a Compact Flash card to the system... but it doesn't cover using an automount daemon.

  • Terapan Mine (Score:4, Informative)

    by HughsOnFirst ( 174255 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @11:06PM (#6971395)
    I was going to do almost exactly this except without the airplane part.

    My plan was to use a Terapan [terapintech.com]
    Mine tethered to a digital SLR with the Terapan set up as the USB master
    and the SLR as the slave.

    Then I would stick a wifi card in the mine and program it to continuously
    download the files from the DSLR and ftp them to my server when it could.

  • like this? (Score:3, Informative)

    by sethgecko ( 167305 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @11:18PM (#6971485) Homepage
    #!/usr/local/bin/ksh
    while true
    do
    if [[ -x /CFmountpoint/imagedir ]];then
    server=$(nslookup <serverName>)
    if [[ $server = *<serverIP>* ]];then
    rsync -e ssh -az /CFmountpoint/imagedir/ <server>:imagedir/
    fi
    fi
    sleep 60
    done

    anything else?

  • That's kinda cool... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @11:24PM (#6971537)
    ... it could be uploading photos the moment a radio signal is established, as opposed to waiting for a grunt to hook up a cable.

    Pretty slick!

    Kinda curious if you've considered using a PocketPC for that. Just plug the CF card into the PocketPc that already has 802.11 going, then write a simple little app that handles the transfer bit. That'll get you into the 5lb mark, and there's no moving parts to break. The downside is that may be a little pricier than you have in mind. The plus side is that it turns on instantly and has its own display etc.

  • ipaq (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @11:42PM (#6971666) Homepage Journal
    iPaq + linux + CF reader + 802.11g card + 20 minutes persuading the compsci major to write you an app + cron job for this = success!

    i'm sure you could have equal luck with a palm pilot of sorts if you worked at it hard enough.
    • I really wouldn't use a PalmOS device- you woukd have to do a lot more work. Most likely you'd end up writing a app in C, not just scripting something. That C app will take a lot longer to write and even longer to test. There are scripting options for POS, but not with all of the extensibility and support as on InCE and Linux.

      Also, you'd run into a lot of reliability problems- you'd have to make some external box that would reboot the POS device whenever it wasn't responding, over serial most likely; it'd
  • you can get a PDA with a CF wifi card for $200.
    Remove unnecessary parts and it should be under
    200 grams. Trick is: Your video cam is recording
    to flash, and you want the flash connected to the
    pda's flash adapter when it comes in range.
    To do this, control SCRs from the serial port
    of the PDA, to switch connections. uCLinux might
    be helpful if you dislike PalmOS code.
  • 1. Have some obscure technical business idea.
    2. Ask gullible/nice slashd^H^H^H^H^H^H free consultants to do the hard part for you.
    3. Profit!!!!!
  • #!/bin/bash
    mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/complactflash
    cp -R ~/whateverdata /mnt/complactflash
    scp /mnt/compactflash/* userid@whatever:~/filesfromhelicopter

    Then you can make it executable, chmod +x script.sh
    then just get some gui to launch it by makeing a icon for it, so you can just double click it. And just make sure you save everything to ~/whateverdata
  • Assuming you are taking photos while in the air, why bother removing the compact flash card at all or mounting anything inside the helicoptor? Use the Nikon D2H [nikonusa.com] for taking your pictures and add on the WT-1A wireless transmitter [nikonusa.com]. You'll need to be patient though, as the products have been announced, but not yet released. It uses FTP over 802.11b to transfer the images.

  • The key part about this is that it seems like a kind of surveillance ops situation in which the person is taking pictures that shouldn't be transmitted to others except when they land in a secured area.

    I think in order to do this you're going to need to switches, one on the base of the helicopter (which becomes depressed upon landing) and the other inside for verification. That way you aren't trying to transmit in an emergency landing situation. While I'm not a programmer, you should be able to use those a

  • I live in Kauai and make my living piloting helicopter tours over the Napali coast.

    I give my passengers a digital camera to use during the 90 minute flight.

    Upon disembarking, it is nice to have them be able to pick up the photos that they took or better yet take a CD home.

    • Re:why i need this (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Matthew Weigel ( 888 )

      It might be better, then, to make it hop online whenever a CF card is inserted (that is, at the end of the trip), rather than "as soon as it gets in range". A light laptop with a PCMCIA slot running Linux should be able to run arbitrary commands at insertion just fine.

      The alternative seems to be playing with war-driving tools to initiate an action when it sees the right WiFi network...

      • The alternative seems to be playing with war-driving tools to initiate an action when it sees the right WiFi network...

        why? rsync over ssh (or scp) verifies that you're talking to the right server. who cares about determining if you're on the right wifi network? find out if your server is there, start syncing. If the ssh keys don't match, it just won't go.

    • It might be easier and cheaper just to take a laptop with cdburner on the helicopter. Then you could either burn the cd after you have landed, or get the customers to burn the cd.
  • Your project sounds very similar in needs to another application I'd discussed with a friend some time ago. When the Civil Air Patrol [cap.gov] gets called out on a search-and-rescue mission, they frequently fly over the suspected area with a video camera, sending frames down to the ground with slow-scan TV [kent.net] so that an expert on the ground can identify likely spots to search. The image quality sucks and the data rate is worse.

    It'd be nice if these folks could carry a multi-megapixel digicam on the plane, snap pics of
  • Is this just a way to send the data or does the helicopter take the pictures?
    You are not very clear beacause you are talking about a reader.
    You could build a system with say an ez80 or AVR chip that has a memory card reader, memory card emulator and network connection.
    You would plug the memory card into your device. Then your device into your camera. The network connection goes to a small AP. Then add the software.
    You would have to have an electronc way to swap the memory card but that would not be too difi

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