The Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card is probably one of the more complex storage devices I’ve seen lately . The basic 4gb model packs a wireless network card into a Class 6 SDHC unit.  The result is wireless photo transfer to a local PC and then onward to one or more web-based sharing services of your choosing. A system this complx isnt without it’s caveats, though.  Read on for the full story, including my discoveries and workaround.

The package contains exactly what you see in the photo above: 1 card and one reader.  Software is contained on  the card reader itself, and is autorun when you attach the card/reader pair to the PC, per the included instructions.

The software is comprised of two parts, and is pretty straightforward in its installation.  The first part is the “Helper” which seems to do the actual work of transferring the photos to the local PC;  The second part is the “Manager” which allows you to configure the card and some other settings.  Using this system requires Internet access for setup, and probably also for continued operation (though I can’t say for sure).

After you create your account (which stores your config online, think Logitech Harmony), it prompts for some wireless config, and you’re off and running.  I had this part running on my Windows box in about 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, this really wasnt “good enough” for me, since I don’t have an always-on Windows PC at the moment (since I collapsed my Windows Domain).

Thankfully, someone took it upon themselves to write a EyeFi Standalone Server in Python.  The author says that he’s only tested it in Windows (though I don’t understand why that would be desirable, since you could just use the packaged app), but I can verify that it runs fine under Ubuntu, with no modifications.  There’s one config you need to pick up out of an XML file from your Windows-based install, but beyond that, it’s pretty braindead.

A few things I’ve noticed about the Standalone server:

• It’s not as fast to “first file” as the Official code
• It really doesnt like running without STDIN and STDERR attached, though I can’t understand why (I just dump both to /dev/null)
• No facilities exist to run it as a daemon

All that said, functionality is great for what I plan on using it for;  Mostly, I just want a convenient way to get photos taken around the house back to my PC without constantly shuffling SD cards.   I had great luck with this over the weekend, taking photos of a few projects that will be posted soon.

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Products, Technology by Kevin