I bought an Eye-Fi Pro X2 card for my Canon IXUS whilst on holiday. This is mostly just random notes and experiences I've had with it so far.

There are multiple models of Eye-Fi cards and they differ on speed of the flash, storage, WiFi geotagging support and hotspot access. Geotagging and hotspot are optional extras for the lower end models. The price difference between the Pro X2 and the various other models of Eye-Fi cards was small enough that I just went with the Pro X2. I don't need the RAW support but its there if I do. *shrug*

The card itself isn't very smart and the designers have admitted that there is very little resources available in the SoC inside the card. The WiFi network must have DHCP running. The computer running the Eye-Fi software must be on the same subnet as the Eye-Fi card for it to be able to do a direct transfer. The card and software rely on a server run by Eye-Fi to work fully. Its possible to make it work without access to this server but it involves some fiddling and features like geotagging won't work.

If you want to use any of the online photo uploader features e.g. upload to Facebook or Flickr or do a transfer if you don't have the software running somewhere locally then all your photos are relayed through the api.eye.fi server which actually does the transfer on your behalf.

The tiny antenna inside the Eye-Fi card and the sub-optimal positioning of SD slots in cameras means you need to have a very good signal for it to work. If you buy one then don't be surprised if you need to be in the same room as the AP.

The Eye-Fi software is a big Adobe AIR app so only Mac + Windows. The geotagging has to be done via WiFi as its part of the transfer process with the Eye-Fi software. The software contacts the Eye-Fi server and supplies the recorded WiFi AP details to hopefully get the coordinates in return.

The possibilities of hacking the Eye-Fi card itself are fairly minimal. It runs eCos and is very locked down. Firmware updates are model specific and tailored specifically for your card + serial number as the hardware is apparently identical between all cards.

People have managed to replicate most of the functionality of the Eye-Fi software though. I've got a C++ based Eye-Fi software clone running on my Linux server which will accept photos from my camera locally then run a script which geotags the photo using the Skyhook DB and then rotates it for me as necessary. I just grab them via Samba or NFS afterwards.

Yeah, I extolled the virtues of the Eye-fi card in a post a few months back -- I absolutely love it. The tech is marvelous, and they've done a good job sneaking a lot of functionality into such a limited space.

I do have some issues with the platform and the software. The limit of one one "local" and one "remote" destination for the photos is a bit of a drag, and has led to people using services like Pixelpipe to send them to multiple destinations.

I'm also not happy with how they implemented the FTP upload capability -- sending it to a server at Eye-fi which then FTPs to the server instead of just sending it to the FTP directly. Some forum posts by the developers/founders suggest they had some technical reasons for doing so (something about not wanting to waste space dealing with different FTP server types, passive FTP, etc.) but it's still a bummer, because if I'm at home uploading some HD movies, it can take a really long time (even on my fast fiber connection) for them to travel all the way out to a remote server and then back to my FTP on my LAN, when if it was just connecting to the FTP directly, it would be a lot faster.

I looked into that 3rd party software you linked to, but got distracted, and never got around to trying it out. Are you pretty happy with it? If I remember right, it only works when your camera's on the same network as the server? Can you still use it remotely the normal Eye-fi way through their servers?

Yeah. The recommendation by the Eye-Fi people seem to be that if you want to do anything unusual or custom then you implement the Gallery API. You're forced to use the api.eye.fi server to handle the transfer though.


I didn't know that FTP was via api.eye.fi originally. Initially I thought it was just doing a direct FTP transfer to whatever IP/host you specify. Its a bit lame that it does require the eye-fi server to handle anything except direct transfers.


It appears to work well enough for what I need to do with it. It definitely could do with some more polish though as at the moment there is a certain amount of config tweaking and script editting necessary.


Yes and no respectively. The card spams ARP broadcasts to locate machines on the local subnet. It'll then start to probe to see if any of them is running something which acts like the official Eye-fi server software. If it can't find anything then it'll do the api.eye.fi based transfer otherwise it'll just directly send it to that machine.

The server clone I'm using only emulates the direct transfer mechanism and doesn't do anything with the internet based on. The Eye-fi transfers require unique keys and nobody appears to have managed to work out how they're generated. Everybody seems to just copy the keys out of the official software configuration.

I'm pretty happy with the card anyway. It does what I need it to do. The official software would probably be good enough but I want to run it on my server so needed to go third party.

This reminds me, I have one of these to sell.

I think the hardware is pretty good, but the software package is a total nightmare. The support from EyeFi is also shocking. I had a problem where the software wouldn't run on my Mac, it just kept telling me to reinstall. I couldn't uninstall, reinstall, nothing. In the end after 2 months of back and forth with EyeFi I gave up.

So if anyone is interested make me an offer

I should point out that I recently tried again and everything now works fine, it must have been a bug in the software.

Cheers

Cris