SD Card Copying Software

*Created by Eoin Daly

This program was made to help everyone's favorite Ray of Sunshine. This enables the copying of a single (or multiple, though that seems impractical) ISO image file to multiple USB devices at once.

This was written using the tkinter library, along with a number of other python modules to help with multithreading, file copying, and path handling and built with the PyInstaller package.

Further details about the application's functionality and possible additions can be found below.

Getting Started

This application should be run with some version of Python 3. A requirements.txt is provided as well for pip installs (to install off of a requirements.txt, run pip install -r requirements.txt). Before running, make sure all the path variables are set correctly (more details can be found in the Variables section).

To compile into an executable, use PyInstaller as pyinstaller -wF USBCopy.py. If a certain icon is desired and available, PyInstaller could be run instead as pyinstaller -wF -i ${ICON_PATH} USBCopy.py.

PyInstaller Flags:
-w: Has executable launch without a terminal open behind it.
-F: Bundles executable to be only one file.
-i FILE.ico: Set the icon of the executable to be the icon specified.

Core Operation

Once the application is opened, the user is greeted with a GUI with simple instructions on how to select an ISO and begin copying. Once the "Begin File Transfer" button is pressed, the program searches for drives it can copy to. Currently, it is fitted to only look for drives that are non-essential (so no C:/ or S:/) and less that 8 GB in total size. If no drives are found, an error message is returned.

If there are usable drives, a confimation window appears, listing all the drives to be copied to along with the ISO file name and an approximate time if recorded. Pressing okay will close the confirmation window and a loading bar animation will start on the original GUI. Once copying is completed, the loading bar stops and the user is alerted with another window popup that file transfer has been completed.

Variables

Certian variables are located at the top of the source code and are easy to change to help flexibility of the program. The following are a list of the important variables a future maintainer should be aware of if trying to edit the code.

• iso_path: This is a variable set to be the path of a local directory on the host computer that contains all the ISO image folders.
• img_path: This is set to be the path of the UEI logo that is displayed in the main GUI. This could be on the shared drive, though it is preferred to be stored locally to ensure existence.
• iso_storage: This is the location on the shared drive where new ISO image folders will be added to and where the software will look to for checking for new ISOs.
• instructions: The path for the instructions.txt file for the built in help menu.
• drives: A list of all drives the program is allowed to check. Currently, C and S have been removed, so any new important drives that are located on the host should be removed from this list.
• approx_times: An attribute of the Main tkinter class. This is a dictionary that contains an approximate measure of the time needed to copy a specific ISO image. If a new image is added, it's name and approximate time should be added to this dictionary. Timing can be checked by using the provided copyTime_SH.py script (exchanging path variables) and running time python copyTime_SH.py. The program has error checking in place such that it can run without an approximate time, but it would be nice to have.

Multithreading

The application uses the python threading module to assist in faster copying to multiple devices. Because certain ISO images can take a long time to copy, it was decided that starting a thread to take care of copying to the different drives was much faster. A thread is also created when checking for new/updated ISO images.

File Copying

This application uses the shutil module for file copying. Each ISO is individually copied using the shutil.copyfile() function. This proved to be the fastest (and simplest) method of copying to FAT32 drives. Note: Copying to NTFS drives is a bit slower, but not enough to consider changing the method used.

Adding New ISOs

To add a new ISO image for the application to be able to use, place it in a folder named whatever your ISO image is named (something simple to help easier finding). Then place this into whatever path the iso_storage is set to. The program will automatically check to see if it has the latest versions of every locally stored ISO as well as new ISOs in the iso_storage. If needed, it will update the local directory of ISOs upon startup.

Adding Additional Popups

If new extensions to the application need some new popup windows, the implementation is very simple. Note: If a popup requiring no more functionality than a popup to display a message and the user closes it anyway, use the alert() method of the Main class. To create a new popup, use the tkinter class Toplevel(). Toplevel() takes an argument for a master. In this case, the master should be the Main class, so if the popup is within a method for the Main class, a popup can be instatiated by saying Toplevel(self). When creating widgets for this popup window, be sure to set their master to be your popup and not the Main.

Future Considerations / Improvements

The current methods involving finding ISO files do not account for instances where there may be a single subdirectory in any directory. The program simply searches for the directories containing only one item and assumes that item is an ISO. This should be fixed if Austyn decides to start stacking directories for no reason.

There should also be better handling of threads throughout the program. Creating threads as class variables just to overwrite them when needing to run again seems sloppy (in the case of the get_files_thread and check_isos_thread).