Automated Wireless File Transfers?

Posted by Cliff on Monday September 15, 2003 @02:30PM 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?"

1 of 39 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:why i need this by Matthew+Weigel · 2003-09-16 10:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

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...

--
--Matthew