Android / IOS / pc sharing challenge.

barx

barx

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OK, not truly android or b4a related, but you guys are a good collection of knowledge to interrogate.

At work, we have started a new contract (Installing Solar PV systems for those that care). As part of the installs, we have to take photos of certain parts and at the end of the day we all return to the office and need to sync photo's to the supervisors laptop. The situation is, the teams of installers have ranging devices, some android, some IOS. There is a local wifi network available BUT no internet access, internal traffic only. All the photos need to end up on an external hdd connected to the laptop.

Here's is what I have tried so far.

creating a smb share and looking for smb file share app, No success due to device not finding the laptop.

installing a ftp server on laptop, and client on devices. Again, server not found. Very little is known (or discoverable) about this network.

So, how (not taking into account my failed attempts above) would you solve this challenge?

To make it more interesting, they want it up and running for tomorrow. Lol, that simply isn't going to happen, but having something to work with would help.
 
thedesolatesoul

thedesolatesoul

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There are many ways to solve it, but here is what I would do.
Connect an Android phone to the laptop.
Everyone who comes in, transfers their phone/tablet images to this main phone using "bump". Bump is the easier way to transfer photos between iOS/Android/etc imho.
Once all the photos are transfered on the main phone connected to the laptop (via usb), run a script or something to copy everything to the external hdd.
 
barx

barx

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thedesolatesoul said:
There are many ways to solve it, but here is what I would do.
Connect an Android phone to the laptop.
Everyone who comes in, transfers their phone/tablet images to this main phone using "bump". Bump is the easier way to transfer photos between iOS/Android/etc imho.
Once all the photos are transfered on the main phone connected to the laptop (via usb), run a script or something to copy everything to the external hdd.
Click to expand...
not heard of bump. will look into it. thanks
 
barx

barx

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eps blue tooth is too slow. We are talking each person having 25 to 30 photos per day. and 5 people all having to sync before we can go home. Each photo is about 3.5 mb.thanks for the suggestion
 
eps

eps

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I use Bluetooth quite often, when sharing files between my laptop and phone.. I guess you just need to ensure that the laptop in question has Bluetooth or you have a Bluetooth dongle.

Just seen your post.. oh well! Although there is a High Speed variant..
 
D

dilettante

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barx said:
There is a local wifi network available BUT no internet access, internal traffic only.
Click to expand...

So assuming this is some form of peer WiFi network and all devices are connected to it... Is it possible the problem here is really one of "discovery?"

Windows devices can use NetBIOS name resolution on peer networks for both TCP/IP and SMB activities, but a lot of mobile OSs and apps lack this form of discovery even when using SMB file sharing. I know it's a headache on Android, and probably on iOS though I don't know that. The upshot is you have to enter the current IP address of the server, and this gets old very fast when they can change regularly.

So a possible hack might be to have the laptop display its current IP address (some small program, Windows has a few built in like ipconfig.exe). Then each mobile device will have to enter this into its SMB, FTP, etc. client. Ugly? Very.

Otherwise all I can think of is a custom app on the laptop and each device. The laptop would be a file transfer server (using FTP, HTTP, whatever) that responds to a UDP broadcast replying with its current IP address. The mobile device clients would send such a UDP broadcast to "ping" for the server's IP, and from there be able to transfer.
 
barx

barx

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I think bump is out as it requires an internet connection
 
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