ESP 32 cam Upload of Webserver failed!

Did you have the serial monitor open?  I've had a few times when the IDE reports that it could not open the serial port to upload the code because I had the serial monitor open and data was being pushed to it.  

Hi,@huckohio, thanks for the hint, unfortunately this is not the solucion. Still seeking!

The ESP32-CAM is very sensitive to the power supply. Are you sure the ESP32-CAM is powered up?

Otherwise, if you're using the Arduino IDE, try restarting it. I sometimes have this problem and it won't upload until I restart the Arduino IDE.

New to the whole ESP thing and I have been having very similar problems over the past few days and I have found that I needed to address two problems.

The first one, which I've not seen covered explicitly by anyone else but which is sort of mentioned when numerous people have had programming problems, is that on my boards (from AliExpress) the ground pin next to the Rx / Tx pins is not, in fact, connected to ground but floats at 3V3!

If one of the other two ground pins is connected to the USB/Serial board instead then the ESP32Cam board programs OK. (At least for me on both my boards).

The second problem has already been addressed and that is of the need to be able to supply pulses of power when the board accesses WIFi etc. Like in the video I had set up an additional supply from my bench power supply, but unless I wound the current limit up to about half an amp the program would crash (Brownout) when accessing WiFi. To prevent this, and to allow a much less powerfull supply to be used, I connected a 1000uF 25V capacitor between 5V and 0V. All is now working as it should.

That was all done using the Antenna Test sketch so today I hope to get the camera itself working......

Posted by: @davejs

New to the whole ESP thing and I have been having very similar problems over the past few days and I have found that I needed to address two problems.

The first one, which I've not seen covered explicitly by anyone else but which is sort of mentioned when numerous people have had programming problems, is that on my boards (from AliExpress) the ground pin next to the Rx / Tx pins is not, in fact, connected to ground but floats at 3V3!

If one of the other two ground pins is connected to the USB/Serial board instead then the ESP32Cam board programs OK. (At least for me on both my boards).

The second problem has already been addressed and that is of the need to be able to supply pulses of power when the board accesses WIFi etc. Like in the video I had set up an additional supply from my bench power supply, but unless I wound the current limit up to about half an amp the program would crash (Brownout) when accessing WiFi. To prevent this, and to allow a much less powerfull supply to be used, I connected a 1000uF 25V capacitor between 5V and 0V. All is now working as it should.

That was all done using the Antenna Test sketch so today I hope to get the camera itself working......

What bench power supply do you use? This mirrors something I saw with an ESP32 of mine; it would brownout trying to connect to WiFi even though I was powering it via USB, and that USB had previously supplied sufficient current for it to work.

@ YurkshireLad

It is a 30+ year old Maplin dual 0-30V, 0-2A adjustable bench supply with a similar AliExpress breadboard dual voltage converter to that used in the video to give me 3V3 and 5V so that I could experiment with both voltages.

The final breadboard runs off of 5V and I did get the camera working OK - just need to mount it sideways to get the correct picture orienation now(!) and fit the external antenna for better WiFi connectivity.

I'm not sure if its possible on here (first time on here), but if it is I'll post some pictures when I get a bit more time this afternoon.

@davejs Bill let me know it is possible to change picture orientation in the software, I haven't tried it out yet but here is the conversation from him.

Arlo

Actually, you can do this in the stylesheet, in fact, the code already rotates it 270 degrees (ie. 90 degrees left):

 

.rotate90 {
-webkit-transform: rotate(270deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(270deg);
-o-transform: rotate(270deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(270deg);
transform: rotate(270deg);
}

If you open the "unminified" version of the app_httpd.css file you'll see this starting on line 678.  This class, rotate90, is called in the code that displays the video stream.  

<div id="stream-container" class="image-container">
<div class="close" id="close-stream">×</div>
<img id="stream" src="" class="rotate90">
</div>

 

You could either modify the class, create a new class or even eliminate it entirely if the camera is already the right way around.

I also ran into this issue when I was building this, I have ESP32CAM boards from a variety of sources and a few of them were "sideways".

Hope that helps.

Bill

That looks very interesting, thanks. You'll have to forgive me though, as I have spent most of my hobby years programming PICs in Oshonsoft Basic so all this Arduino stuff is new to me and throughout my carreer I've tried to avoid "C" as to me it is a "write only language" although modern IDEs with text colouring and auto indenting make it more readable - but that's only me.

Here is my attempt on my troubleshooting board, now running on batteries with external antenna (Maplin PSU in the background) :-

 Dave

Problem solved! It had  nothing to do with the ESP32, a driver for the FT 232 RL was missing! 😊 😊 ESP 32 Cam is working well. No further requests on this topic!