ESP32 CAM - 10 Dollar Camera for IoT Projects

@zander 

Not sure what you mean in your second question...

This should clarify things

What I'm thinking is that the various ESP32-CAM boards should be compatible with the ESP32-CAM-MB hat. This would be helpful in breaking out those pins and, at a  minimum, allow me to recover something from the bad module.

...have you really proved it is defective?

Partly yes, but mostly no.

Yes, in that, out of the box, it reports an error during initialization that AFAICT is a PSRAM problem. When the package arrived, before I opened it, I got the CameraWebServer sketch to compile. There was some confusion about which configuration settings  to  use. There's no Aideepen board in Arduino; I could find nothing on the web; I sent an email to Aideepen about it and got no response. I finally decided to just use AI_Thinker and see what happens. If needs be, I'd go through all the settings. Well, needs be but I got the same results for all of them. I did search on the error code and I found Camera probe failed with error 0x105 · Issue #450 After reading the reports of the error my reaction was that there's a lot of "works for me" but no real diagnosis of  the problem. However, from my unpaid position, this is sufficient evidence of a defect.

Mostly no because, as a software engineer, I know this this is far from a definitive diagnosis of the problem. What's needed is to dig down into the espressif code and find out why the error is generated and try to replicate it; see if there a way to test the PSRAM or whatever is causing the problem and verify a fault. There's a nagging part of me that says the hardware is fine, the software is defective.

But...I'm still learning the ESP32 chip and haven't gotten the fundamentals yet. I want the low level code to identify the chip, how much memory is installed, etc. This data is available (shows up in  the boot sequence) but I haven't learned how to do it yet. And that's a lot of work that I'm planning to get to.

But not before I finish DroneBot Boot Camp 101 and not because I can't get the stupid $15 camera working.

Is there any possibility you had a static event?

What? What are you saying here? That this is somehow my fault? That I'm to blame? Well, that's not very nice! Now you've hurt my feelings. I may cry.

(I'm 67 yrs. old (you're 83, I believe, so you as well) and a static discharge event is not a high priority event for me. I'm more concerned with the sudden, unexpected, and explosive kind.)

But seriously, you're right, it may have been a static discharge. That's a possible cause. I just want to confirm the failure result. The two boards should be identical, and one reports working PSRAM. I need to find out how to address that RAM, verify I can address it on the working board and can't on the defect board. I don't know how to do that yet.

Are any of these settings incorrect?

Again, maybe yes and maybe no. But not from my hand.

In the CameraWebServer sketch the config settings are preset using compile time constants and selected using another constant to select the model, e.g., CAMERA_MODEL_AI_THINKER. However, I note that in one of versions of the sketch I found, the one from RandomNerds,  there's a check of the PSRAM performed while the configuration is being initialized.

void setup() {
    //...
    camera_config_t config;
    config.ledc_channel = LEDC_CHANNEL_0;
    config.ledc_timer = LEDC_TIMER_0;
    config.pin_d0 = Y2_GPIO_NUM;
    //...
    if (psramFound()) {
        config.frame_size = FRAMESIZE_UXGA;
        config.jpeg_quality = 10;
        config.fb_count = 2;
    }
    //...

So, I would guess that the configuration doesn't affect the PSRAM addressability. But, again, I haven't confirmed that PSRAM is the culprit. The error is a report of "resource not found" during a probe of the psram. That's where I'm at.

My next step is to try to program the working board and see where that takes me.

Of course, if there's any failure, I will blame others.

@tfmccarthy I think I saw a 105 error on another forum, it was fixed by changing cameras,

Posted by: @zander

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@tfmccarthy I think I saw a 105 error on another forum, it was fixed by changing cameras,

That's precious!

Just keep replacing parts until "works for me!"

If the devices were only bigger, they'd kick 'em!

Did anybody try a hammer?