The workflow I’m working on right now is this: staff will be moving barcoded collection objects into moving boxes. The moving boxes have barcodes. We want to scan a moving box and scan everything that goes into the moving box, and wind up with a list which can be imported into PastPerfect and used to set the temporary location of all the objects on the list to the scanned moving box. Separately, we want to be able to take a photo of an object which doesn’t currently have a photo in the database, such that we can associate the photo with the object later.
Unfortunately, we have to use a different app for each task. The Dropbox app can almost handle both, but it really wants to crop photos to find the rectangle of a piece of paper you’re scanning, not take a regular photo. So we’ll be using a paid ($6/year subscription) app called UploadCam for the photo part:
Making lists
We’ll be using the Dropbox app, because you can edit a simple text file with it directly.
In the step where you make sure that ScanBoard is the active keyboard and that it’s ready to scan, if the logo key isn’t green, try pushing the scan button on the side of the device. If it still doesn’t light up within a couple seconds of that, exit out of Dropbox and launch the IPCSupport app. Once the device info is loaded in that (press the scan button again if it’s not loading in IPCSupport, either), the barcode reader should be awake, and you can switch back to Dropbox.
From a laptop or desktop, this is even easier. Just create a new text file and use a bluetooth barcode scanner (currently testing with a TEEMI TMSL-50) to scan all the objects into it; no need to involve Dropbox.
Photos
We’ll be using the UploadCam app for this.
While you can set part of the photo’s file name, there are two caveats: first, a file name can’t have a slash in it, so in this case the object’s ID was 1993-41/7, and the filename will include 1993-417 instead. Second, UploadCam appends the upload time to the filename, so the full filename of this photo ends up being “1993-417 2017.07.06 09.25.06.694.JPG”. That’s good enough for me, though.
Processing
This should get its own writeup later, but the gist of it is that I’ll have a script running on a computer synced to the same Dropbox account, watching for new files. When any come in, it will transfer them to a folder on the internal fileserver. I may have the script remove the timestamp from the photo filenames; it depends on how PastPerfect deals with attaching images.
Text files containing lists of objects can be imported as a list in PastPerfect, and then all the objects on the list can have their temporary location set to the moving box.
Photos can be attached to the objects one at a time within PastPerfect. If there’s a way to batch that, I don’t know about it. The best I can do is to make sure that the photos are named after the objects they represent, for ease of finding.
Update on the dropbox sync side of things: I didn’t even bother to write a script to copy things over. What I’ve done instead is installed the dropbox client on a linux machine which also has the file server mounted. Inside the dropbox folder on the linux box, I’ve made symbolic links pointing to the folders on the server; this allows files uploaded to dropbox to be immediately (well, relatively quickly, anyway) present on the file server. I’ve got a very simple watchdog script keeping the dropbox client running:
#!/bin/sh
cd /home/burkeuser
(./dropbox.py running && ./dropbox.py start) > watchdog.log
That script runs from the “burkeuser” account’s cron job every two minutes. If dropbox is running, nothing happens. If it isn’t running, it gets started.
All this really gets me is not having to figure out how to make the dropbox client run as a service on the Windows file server. I’m not sure I’d want to do that even if it were possible.