video on some DIY camera raspberry pi projects

foot wrote:

ProfHankD wrote:

foot wrote:

15 New Raspberry Pi Zero projects you must try in 2022!" - ToP Projects Compilation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q76YEU8oncE

Yes, there's a lot to like about the Pi Zero with WiFi... but camera adds to the cost and all Pi variants are currently solid unobtainium.

The ESP32-CAM is still only $7 including a 2MP camera and WiFi and Bluetooth, and works with the Arduino environment. I published a paper on using ESP32-CAM as a programmable camera research platform in January; here are my presentation slides . Many people are using ESP32-CAM; here are 60+ ESP32-CAM Projects, Tutorials and Guides with Arduino IDE from RandomNerdTutorials.

luckily I bought a couple, before supplies dried up

Very lucky.

btw, the cost of a raspberry pi 4b w 8gig has really increased, over what I bought one for

it's so expensive now that it makes installing linux on an old laptop more worthwhile. And the performace should be way better than the raspberry pi 4b.

plus I have a couple...need to dig them up and check if they still work...

The ESP32-CAM is designed as a stand-alone IoT device. It contains a dual-core 32-bit 240MHz ESPRESSIF processor (not ARM) that includes floating point support. It has 520KB of internal SRAM and 4MB of external SRAM, with 4MB of internal flash memory and a TF card slot that officially can take up to 4GB cards (but actually works with larger). It is fast enough to happily run a WiFi camera server that can stream video while doing face detection at a decent framerate (although face detection isn't at the full 2MP camera resolution).

The biggest imaging limitation is really that the external SRAM is in two pages, and there's a slight delay crossing the page boundary that can cause some data loss when reading full-resolution raw images from the camera -- so most applications read JPEGs (which can be with raw gamma) from the camera. If it weren't for that, it could handle a higher-resolution camera too. There's actually an ESP32 variant with 16MB, but it's not common.

ESP32 lacks the Pi's GPU and video out, but has more I/O support and is much more self-contained, only needing external power. It has various low-power operating modes; from 160-260mA with everything active down to 10uA deep sleep with only a ULP coprocessor and RTC running.