The Toshiba Air wifi connected SD Card

Preamble

It takes me a very long while to acquire something - this is the case with the Toshiba Air SD Card - it's been several generations now that modern cameras have built-in wifi and I even have one of these but finally I got myself a wifi connected card for older camera. When I shoot now, I often want the instant gratification of uploading to social networks (G+ or Instagram) soon, without waiting for the journey home. The two market leaders for this type of card is the Toshiba Air and the Eye Fi. I knew that Olympus has an association with distributing Toshiba Air cards, so when I saw much reduced prices on eBay, I took down the local dealer's address and went in person to get one.

Things didn't look good when I inserted the card into either the Olympus E-PM2 or the Panasonic GF-3 - by what I could read from the brief documentation, I expected the card to broadcast a wifi SSID so that my phone or Windows PC could see it as a wifi source.

When you insert the card into any device, the wifi access point should start broadcasting and keep broadcasting for 5 minutes if it is on autostart. However in my case it was not on autostart and was on manual. I needed to set it to autostart.

To set up the card using the computer

• Insert the card into the the sdcard slot of the computer
• Run the FlashAir program - it was difficult to find, I found it at this Toshiba webpage.
• Ensure the Wireless LAN is set to automatic startup
• Change the connection password for the card to ensure that other cameras and device don't hijack your connection or data.

FlashAir.exe menus and screens

FlashAir Main Menu

FlashAir Network Settings

FlashAir Wireless LAN Startup Menu - ensure that this is set to automatic startup otherwise the card will not broadcast the SSID

FlashAir Drive Setting

FlashAir Initialise / Change - use this to set up the card to factory defaults and write missing or deleted folders and files

More Info

The Toshiba web pages / sites that came up in Google Search were not helpful - they were either describing product from the viewpoint of a manufacturer rather than from the viewpoint of a consumer. Often there were redirects to missing pages or pages written in Japanese. I finally found a Toshiba Singapore webpage that seemed readable. The details eluded me until I found a briefly written pdf hosted on an Olympus website. The document describes both the set up procedure using the FlashAir.exe computer program or the Flash Air mobile device app.

Here's what I discovered.

1. The SD card appears to the camera or the computer (with SD Card slot) as a storage device.
2. Certain folders and files are precious and should not be erased or formatted out during file deletion or formatting either in the camera or the computer. If these folders / files are deleted, you need to run FlashAir.exe (or in my case, FlashAir_v3.exe) - available in Windows or Mac variant, to replace these files on the inserted SD Card.
3. Take care not to eject the SD Card without using the Windows Safely Remove procedure otherwise the special folders or file might be damaged by file system corruption. Of course they can be replaced by a card format but it's just more work.

The files and folders are in this structure

+---MISC

+---PRIVATE

|   |   FILEINFO.TBL

|   |   CACHE.DAT

|   \---AVCHD

|       +---BDMV

|       |   |   INDEX.BDM

|       |   |   MOVIEOBJ.BDM

|       |   |

|       |   +---PLAYLIST

|       |   +---CLIPINF

|       |   \---STREAM

|       \---AVCHDTN

|               THUMB.TID

|               THUMB.TDT

|

+---GUPIXINF

|   \---CARDICON

|          ICON_128.PNG|          ICON_32.PNG|          ICONINF.TXT

+---SD_WAN

|       CONFIG   

\---DCIM

    +---100__TSB

           FA000001.JPG

\DCIM\100__TSB\FA000001.JPG is an important static file that acts as a flag

Do not delete the folder and file, or you will be unable to change the automatic-manual operation for wireless LAN functionality. 

\SD_WAN\CONFIG is a vital text file containing settings

CONFIG contains text pairs like this:

[Vendor]

CIPATH=/DCIM/100__TSB/FA000001.JPG

APPMODE=4

APPNETWORKKEY=*******

VERSION=FA9CAW3AW3.00.00

CID=long hex code

PRODUCT=FlashAir

VENDOR=TOSHIBA

LOCK=1

APPSSID=yourssid

WEBDAV=1

TIMEZONE=40

APPAUTOTIME=300000

DNSMODE=1

Information on these parameters is available at the FlashAir Developer's website

Factory Default Settings

SSID:  flashair_xxxxxxxxxxxx ( x represents MAC address of the Product) 

Security:  WPA2  security key: 12345678 

Encryption and authentification: WPA2-AES (access point mode) 

IP Address" 192.168.0.1 (access point mode)    

Wireless LAN functional specifications 

 Wireless LAN Standard: IEEE802.11b/g/n 

 Modulation: DSSS/CCK (1, 2, 5.5, 11 Mbps), OFDM (6 to 72.2 Mbps) 

 Wireless LAN Security: WEP, TKIP, AES (WPA/WPA2)