Instant Photo Upload

I have been using my Eye-Fi Po X2 with pretty good success.  After coming come from a day of taking pictures, I could turn my camera on and it would upload the pictures I took.  The photos would be ftp'ed to my Linux server directly to a folder that was shared on Dropbox.  I decided to do an experiment to take the being home part out of the process.

I figured up an app on my phone to turn it into a portable hotspot.  I gave it the same WiFi network name and password as my home network.  When, I took my wife and kid to the zoo.  While at the zoo, I turned on the tethering.  As I took pictures, my phone uploaded them to my ftp server which sent them to Dropbox.  This worked for a while, then stopped.  That is when the app told me that if I wanted to continue, that I had to buy the paid version of the app.  I guess they set a daily limit on data.  Since it was a one-time fee of $0.99, I begrudgingly paid for the app.  Then I was up and running again.

After some more time taking pictures, I checked the phone and the uploads stopped working again.  It turns out that after a period of time with no WiFi clients connected to the hotspot, the hotspot turns off.  This is probably a good battery saving feature.  I wasn't keeping my camera on all the time, so the hotspot would turn off from time to time.  This was a bit annoying.

Overall, this proof of concept worked.  It wasn't a perfect success, but it did work.  The end goal is to allow some family members to see the pictures as we take them.  Some of our family is far away and they can't easily join us on a trip to the zoo.  This will help them feel more included with some of the outings that we do.