I built a Cuddeback game camera network that sends all images to a Home unit. From the Home unit, the images are sent to an FTP server using a wifi enable SD card in the Home unit. Received images trigger a python daemon that then SMS messages the images to my cell phone. This system has been haphazardly described by some posts on habitat-talk.com here.

I wanted to receive the images on my cell phone in near realtime, but did not want to use Cuddelink's cell system. (Cell-capable units weren't really available when I built this project 4 seasons ago, anyway.)

Thought I would post info about my setup and build. It may have limited lifespan due to issues with Toshiba's FlashAir cards (see Warnings, below). I will expand the sections of the "data pathway" below into sub-repositories that include hardware and code.

The data pathway is something like this:

Cudeback J cameras
	|
Cuddeback Home 1385 unit
	|
Toshiba FlashAir W-04 wifi SDCard                                                            \
	|                                                                                           \
FTP server (CentOS8)	                                                                         | (inside my network)
	|                                                                                           /
Image retriever, parser, formatter, transmitter, SMS trigger (python 3 daemon on CentOS8)    /
	|       |                                         \
  |     SMS compatible image placed on AWS S3 bucketdata decoder (AWS S3)
	|
SMS message sent via twilio

• Cuddeback Cuddelink J cameras
• Cuddeback Cuddelink Home 1385 receiver
• Toshiba FlashAir SD card

• Amazon AWS S3 Boto3 python library
• twilio python library

• Toshiba FlashAir card sd_wlan
• python daemon (coming soon)

• Toshiba FlashAir cards are discontinued. The Toshiba developer site is gone, but some users are trying resurrect it privately. You may not be able to find any cards for other than ridiculously high prices. Searching finds other WiFi SD cards (e.g. Voorca, ez Share), but I know nothing about them.
• My python daemon solution is highly over-engineered. I was doing a lot of playing and learning about some more enterprise-level concepts. I did not use a framework solution (e.g. django, flask, etc.), which would be an obviously useful tool for such a project.
• The whole WiFi SD Card thing is a ridiculous, but unfortunately necessary, hack just to get the images off of the Home unit in realtime. The entire system would have been a 100x easier build if Cuddeback had in fact enabled the USB port on the Home unit.
• Every step after the FTP-to-my-CentOS-server step is not really necessary if you just want to get the images. You could skip my entire python daemon and just move the images to a Dropbox folder (MS OneDrive, box.com, email, whatever). (The python daemon is the main guilty party in my over-engineering admission.)
• My system's geography is unique; it's in my home. I live in location served by FIOS. My home is on high ground, so signals are easily received over distance. My home overlooks the ~20 acres I hunt, and is surrounded by hundreds of acres of conservation land (where I can't hunt, but I can put cameras).
• Running an old-school FTP server (it's not sftp, FlashAir can't do that) is risky in so many ways. Know what you are doing!!

(Coming soon)