Thursday, January 31, 2013

A Dropbox client for the raspberryPI

Overview

Raspybox is a minimalistic but powerful dropbox client written in python for the RaspberryPI.

How to use it

There are three forms that the program can be executed. The simplest is the graphical way. First you have to execute raspberryDropy.py and type login. Follow the instructions and when you finish press ctrl+D to exit. Now you can use it in any of the three forms.

Setting things up

You need to install the dropbox sdk for python (which can be found in dropbox developer page) and create your own app. Download all the files from the file directory of this project and place them in a directory. Create an app for the whole dropbox and copy paste the keys in raspberryDropy.py accordingly.

User Interfece

To execute the user interface simply type ./raspberryDropy_gui.py . The user interface should come up after a few seconds.
You can also use some shortcuts instead of the menu:
For upload press insert key.
For delete press delete key.
To refresh press F5
To navigate through your directories use the arrow keys and enter or double mouse click to either enter a directory or download a file.
There will be some messages in the console, don't worry about them. If the program crashes send the output as a bug report to the developer. This is because it is the initial version, so it might have some serious bugs.

Dropbox command line

You can also execute the raspberryDropy.py and use the dropbox from the command line. Type help to view the necessary commands.

Alternative command line

Because the RaspberryPI is very useful when using scripts and command line fire and forget programs such a functionality is supported. Instead of running ./raspberryDropy.py to access command line, you can supply a dropbox command as argument. Then the program will start-up execute the command, display the output and die. Be ware that the cache can't work on such situations. You can modify it to keep a cache on a file instead of the memory or use your own in your script.
This part however needs further development and consideration, so the command line can be used efficiently and fast enough (for example it makes no sense to run a command for changing directory, it will be of no use for this purpose)

Contribution

Currently the code is not very well commented, but it should not be very difficult to understand it, since it's a small program. However, a commenting will be done soon, I hope. If you want to contribute to this program, please send a request.

Currently, the target groups are developers, testers and PI hobbyists, but anyone can have a go with it.
You can find everything here:   http://sourceforge.net/p/raspybox/wiki/Home/

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