Sirens — Sensor Acquisition & Photogrammetry Media Platform

Sirens is the desktop download and synchronization component of a larger marine and laboratory photogrammetry workflow. A Sony Alpha A7III captures images, Imaging Edge Mobile transfers them to an Android device, Autosync mirrors the session to an FTP server, and Sirens brings new files to the local rendering workstation. The application polls the remote folder every ten seconds and compares filenames with the local workspace before downloading only the missing images.

I designed and built the application as a Windows portable Electron utility. The main process owns FTP, filesystem and persistent-store operations; the renderer provides the settings, connection status and recent-download view; IPC keeps the two sides separate. The implementation uses Electron, Node.js, basic-ftp, electron-store, Tailwind CSS and electron-builder, with configuration surviving restarts and the final package distributed as a portable executable.

The tool deliberately solves a narrow operational problem: reliable, visible transfer of new image batches rather than bidirectional file management. Existing filenames are skipped, remote files are not renamed or deleted, and a fresh FTP client is created for each polling cycle to avoid stale connections. Plain FTP and locally stored credentials were documented as closed-lab tradeoffs; a production-hardened version would move toward FTPS or SFTP, encrypted secret storage and a stronger preload boundary.