I've been solely using the Seeed Xiao RP2040 for my past electronics exercises so I switched to ESP32 this week. The process took much longer than I had expected due a few issues with network connection and camera activation that I couldn't resolve right away.
I first attempted with the chunkier version, ESP32 CAM that comes with an MB board following this online tutorial
First I had to add the esp32 json link before downloading the esp32 library in Arduino. Then connect to the AI Thinker ESP32-CAM board before opening the example camera sketch file. These steps were straight forward until I had issues with connecting to the wifi (also tried hotspot) as shown in the serial monitor below. The display only shows infinite attempts in trying to network.
Since I wasn't able to troubleshoot the first cam, I decided to try using the Seeed Xiao ESP32 S3 cam to see if the same issue also occurs. I followed the Seeed online tutorial and the process is pretty much the same. The arduino code can be downloaded here and I connected to the same hot spot... which worked!
Since this camera was functioning, I thought why not take a stab at using edgeimpulse to train a small dataset of images of my cat so that the camera can detect when there's a cat presence versus not. That way I can attach the camera to my remote control toy cars as a way to both monitor and play with her.
At the moment, this has yet been resolved with the error being 'camera is not initialized or detected' I need to circle back on this later in the week.
