Monday, August 25, 2008

Geotagging Works!

I took a picture earlier this morning, which wasn't geotagged. I just took another and noticed that my AP had finally gotten into Skyhook's DB. I submitted it last Tuesday and it took a bit less than a week.

If you wonder what this is, I've been making cables to convert my old RAZR chargers to charge the iPhone 3G. The RAZR is a male USB Mini-B, so I need female USB Mini-B connectors which have been really hard to come by. I've been using this guy's schematic to get the right voltages on the USB data pins so the iPhone will actually charge.

P.S. Please no stalking! :)

Monday, August 18, 2008

Zaurus Development

Someone loaned me a Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 so that I might try a port of my software to it. I got an arm cross-compiler, but I can't even get "Hello World" running. It just segfaults. I bet I'm compiling for the wrong platform or something. Oh, well. I really need to get a NIC for this thing. Should make development a lot easier.

I also picked up an iPhone 3G, which got me thinking. Seeing as at least a couple of the Eye-Fi employees have iPhones and that there's already a Mac OS port of the Eye-Fi manager software, I have to wonder if we'll be seeing an Eye-Fi iPhone app some time. The biggest sticking point is that neither the iPhone or the Eye-Fi card can act as a WiFi access point as far as I know, they can only join them.

I also haven't been able to get Loki to work. As far as I can tell, there's no Linux port. Sigh... I did submit my AP to their DB, though.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Eye-Fi Explore and release 005

My old classic Eye-Fi card broke after I squished it, plugged it about 30,000 times and cut a hunk of plastic out of it. The guys at Eye-Fi replaced this "defective" (their words, not mine :) and to show they are swell folks, replaced it with one of the newfangled Eye-Fi Explore cards that do geotagging. Thanks guys! BTW, I don't consider it defective, I consider it abused.

I was able to do all of the card initialization in WINE. It would not complete the final test step, but it works fine anyway. I need to dig through those WINE logs and see if there's anything interesting in them.

New observations:
  1. I have two access points running with the same ESSID, but on different channels. This works for my PCs, but made the card very mad. It would not associate for long enough to upload anything.
  2. The card comes from the factory without its EyeFi/{reqm,rspm,...} files. The manager software must create them. I created them with dd, and was able to use the card before I ran the manager software. I also saw a 'EyeFiManufacturing' wireless network in the card log!
  3. I added a network to the card before I registered it. The card DHCP'd and tried to upload its pictures, but choked once it talked to the Eye-Fi server. No surprise here, but it does open up the possibilities if someone ever reverse-engineers the server protocol.
  4. I enabled geotagging, but it does not seem to work for me, yet. Anybody have this working? Anybody know of any quick ways to check Skyhooks's AP list?
I'm also pleased to announce Eye-Fi Configuration Tool Version 005. This should fix the crashing bugs that some people were seeing. My printf() function was screwed up and calling printf() instead of vprintf(). Git tree here.