Smart Charger: automatically backup your photos

[This is the second post about Arietta: the first is here]

The project
The idea behind this little project is to have a system that charge my phone and automatically backup the photo of my android phone while it is connected.

First of all, you need to attach an usb female adapter to Arietta and connect an usb (powered) hub to it: Follow this page

In order to get the photos on the android phone from Arietta you need to use MTP protocol and there are 2 ways:
a - install mtp-tools packages from repository
b - activate mtp filesystem

For my project the first solution is easier:  launch apt-get install mtp-tools

The solution b was better, because it allows you to mount the phone filesystem and copy files from it with normal linux commands like cp,rsync,mv.. but it's harder because you need to rebuild the arietta image.

External Usb Storage
The Arietta will copy my photos on an external storage instead of the internal sdcard of arietta because this helps to improve the life of the sdcard.

To automatically mount an external storage in a predefined directory:
- use blkid command to obtain an id that identify you external usb storage for the system
- change /etc/fstab and insert a line to specify where the storage mount point

My external usb storage is a simple pendrive formatted with fat32 with UUID FC4D-37AA.
At the end of /etc/fstab I've added this line to mount it on /mnt everytime is plugged in:

UUID=FC4D-37AA /mnt vfat defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

The Backup Script ...
I've created a script called photobackup.sh that use some commands from mtp-tools package to copy and delete jpg photos from the phone:

#!/bin/bash

#check if external storage is present or abort
checkmount=`mount | grep /mnt | wc -l`
echo $checkmount;
if [ $checkmount -ne "1" ]; then
        echo "Usb External Storage not mounted...exiting";
        exit;
fi

echo "Usb External Storage Found";
mtp-files | grep .jpg | awk '{ print $2 }' > lista.txt
while read F ; do
    #there is enough space on device
    spacecheck=`df -h | grep /mnt | awk {'print $5'} | tr -d '%'`
    if [ $spacecheck -gt "95" ]; then
        echo "Not enough space left on device..exiting";
        exit;
    fi
    mtp-connect --getfile $F /mnt/$F # copy the file
    mtp-connect --delete $F          # delete the file from the phone
done

Explanation:
- it checks if Usb External Storage is mounted or it aborts the operation
- it creates a list of jpg files (supposing these are all photos) lista.txt

... and for every photo:
- it checks if there is enough space left on the Usb External Storage
- it reads the list of photos from lista.txt and it uses mtp-connect to copy file to the /mnt/ directory and it deletes the photo from the phone

..and the UDEV Rule!
In order to call photobackup.sh everytime you plug the phone to the hub you need a udev rule.

Create a script 98-my.rules with this content:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="22b8", MODE="0666", RUN+="/root/photobackup.sh"

and copy it on /etc/udev/rules.d

Now everytime you attach the android phone to the hub, while the phone is charging, arietta copy your photos in the external pendrive, if present.

In the next article we will see how to add a led to monitor the status of the operation.