Week 8: Input Devices

ESP 32 CAM

The Chinese company Espressif Systems makes a really interesting board called the ESP 32, which has ~320 kb RAM and wi-fi and bluetooth capabilites built in. They have a verison of the micro-controller that comes equipped with a camera attachment -- the ESP 32 CAM. These modules cost ~$10 a unit, which is great, but as I learned, sometimes means things don't always work as expected (especially given that these boards are manufactured by various third parties).

With the goal of getting the camera up and runninig for this week, I used Neil's milling template to make the FTDI serial-usb connection.

Milling and soldering went well. I learned about using header pins and how to bend them so that they fit the alternating footprint pattern. This can be a bit tricky to do without breaking the pins since the plastic that holds them is quite fragile. The other tricky part is making sure the two rows of connections are parallel for the fixed pins on the the ESP board to fit properly (without damaging the board.

The (LED on the) board would light up when I connected the board to my computer using a FTDI-USB cable (which has the FTDI chip built in). However, I was unable to bootload the board/load it with any code. The board simply would not show up on my computer. I tried. Upon doing some research, it looked like the board which I got from the RPL was made by a relatively unknown manufacturer and sometime this was an issue people had. I'm still not sure if this was exactly the problem, but I also tried installing/reinstalling all of the necessary drivers and connecting to different computers, but was unsucessful in all attempts.

Eventually, in an attempt to resolder the board, in case there was a connection issue -- though the multimeter seems to indicate things were fine--, I broke the board I had made. This happened twice...

I ended up ordering my own ESP Cam boards. They also happened to come with their own FTDI boards, so I wouldn't have to mill my own.

I got one working. Using the example code that comes when you install the ESP library, I was able to stream the camera feed to a web browser connected to the same wi-fi network.

I got two working on the same network. But noticed that the camera's rotation was not consistant from module to module.

To better understand what was happening and how to manipulate the video feed, I used Neil's image processing example and played around with it.