The promise of having a cordless scanner like the Doxie Go, which I reviewed here, is to be able to do the entire paperless workflow without having to plug in to a computer.
Last week I posted about how you can use the Doxie Go with the iPad’s Camera Connection Kit. Today I am going to go through how to achieve the holy grail: scan with the Doxie Go and have the scans appear on the iPad wirelessly.
For that, I will use Doxie’s iPhone/iPad Sync Kit. The folks at Apparent (makers of Doxie) offered to send me a review copy to test out, which was cool of them.
As it turns out, the Doxie kit is actually the Eye-Fi 4GB Connect X2, which comes in the original box along with instructions for using with the Doxie.
The TL;DR version is that it works really well, though the initial setup is a bit more involved.
The Goal
I want to be able to scan documents and have them save to the iPad without having to plug anything in. The entire process will take place on the Doxie Go and the iPad.
What You’ll Need
- A Doxie Go
- Doxie’s Sync Kit or, I would guess, any Eye-Fi card
- The free Eye-Fi iOS app
- An iOS app that lets you create PDFs. I will be using Save2PDF
Setup
I am not going to go through the step-by-step setup, because Doxie’s instruction page is quite good. Here is the high-level workflow:
First, you plug the SD card into the supplied card reader and plug it into a free USB port on your computer.
Once you do that, you install the Eye-Fi Center software and choose where you want scans to go.
Then you install the free Eye-Fi app on your iPad, and follow the rest of the setup steps.
By default, it will create a private Wi-Fi network that you need to connect to with your iPad in order to receive the scans.
In Doxie’s instructions, they recommend doing a few additional settings so that the Eye-Fi can use your existing network, and then switch to the private network if yours is not available. A helpful touch.
Scanning and Importing
To scan, put the Eye-Fi in the back of the Doxie Go and put your paper in. On the iPad, fire up the Eye-Fi app and within a minute or so (usually much less), your scans will automatically populate in the app.
If you want, you can view, email, and share your scans right from the Eye-Fi app.
You don’t need to do anything else. Your scan is imported as JPG in the Camera Roll.
Doing Something With The Scans
From there, the rest of the workflow is the same as in the previous Doxie Go iPad post. You can leave it as JPG, convert it to PDF, or do whatever you want.
All in all, using the Doxie Go iPhone/iPad Sync Kit is very cool. The initial setup is more involved, but there is something magical about running a piece of paper through the scanner and having it automatically appear on the iPad.