How to Make [Almost] Anything | Life + Times Of v.2019

Maharshi Bhattacharya | Masters in Design Studies
Harvard University | Graduate School of Design

[13_interface + application programming]

This week I picked up the work I start in the networking week. In the previous week I spoke with Brian regarding my final project. As per our discussion my device would have essentially two way communication. Firstly, video feed from one device would be sent to another wirelessly and second, voice snippets (of a very small size first recorded and stored on an SD card) would also be sent.

Project breakdown with Brian. It became clear that I'll program an ESP32 to setup a wifi and have it connected to an LCD. An independent camera (ESP32 CAM) programmed to be connected to the wifi, would send images to that server at a rate that makes it look like a video.

Hardware used

I was trying to mill my own ESP32 but due to a soldering mishap and in the interest of time I decided to use an ESP32 Dev Kit that Rob gave me, to set up the wifi server and connect to the LCD.

For the LCD I used an Adafruit 3.5" LCF TFT. One of the problems I faced was to make the right connections between the LCD and ESP32 since there was no documentation available online. I've provided the pinouts here.

With a little help from Brian and Joon, I was able to put together this code, bit as evident it was too long and in the end I had to spent almost two weeks in debugging the code and bringing it to the size seen on the final project page. It was a great learning experience on the Arduino IDE and now I feel quite well versed with it.