Freenove ESP32-WROVER CAM Board

Posted by: @zander

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@williamsweeney830  @davee If you are willing to look at other solutions, I recommend ArduCam. It works with almost every board out there. I was going to use esp32-CAM, but I had too many issues, especially after discovering ArduCam. I have not decided on which board to use it with, but low power is one requirement: NO Wi-Fi. I will use Lora for communications with the cameras. NOTE: Not/can't use Lora for data, it is just a really good way to find out if there is any data (pictures/videos) before approaching the camera. I want to minimize human scent near the cameras. Yes, more expensive, but quality is not usually free.

@zander, @williamsweeney, @davee,

I'm currently using the ArduCam mini 2MP ov2460 in a project that I'm testing to use the camera with PIR to take pictures when activated by persons at the door.. a security camera of sorts.. I'm using the Arduino Uno R3 for now as I'm having a problem with the esp8266 when I take the picture and it uploads using SPIFFS to a web address, the picture ( Jpeg format)won't display as it's corrupted. That's why I'm testing with the UNO as loading the photos on an SD card.. The UNO is equipped with a Data shield that has on board RTC (DS1307) with a SD drive on it to simplify the wiring at bit..When I work out what the deal is with the ESP8266-nodeMcu, I'll post what I find to rectify the problem..

Regards,

LouisR

@inst-tech Thanks for the info Louis. Since that is the same camera as the ESP32 uses, I suspect you are using a different board just to gain a few extra pins for the PIR and SD card.

How easy/hard is the actual camera part? What I mean is when you receive notification via the PIR is taking a picture as simple as one call to the camera library telling it to snap a picture?

Posted by: @zander

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@inst-tech Thanks for the info Louis. Since that is the same camera as the ESP32 uses, I suspect you are using a different board just to gain a few extra pins for the PIR and SD card.

How easy/hard is the actual camera part? What I mean is when you receive notification via the PIR is taking a picture as simple as one call to the camera library telling it to snap a picture?

@zander, Yes Ron, it's a simple call to a procedure, or Function as C++ calls them.

The PIR triggers when motion is detected and goes high, after it's  time delay times out, it goes low and then the call to the function to take the photo and write it to SD happens.

I've included the code in a  word .doc file as an attachment if you want to see how I coded it in the Void loop() section to activate the camera..

regards,

LouisR

@inst-tech Pretty much what I expected.

I appreciate everyone's input on this topic I want to add some specifics to my project as well because I am fairly new to Arduino so the more input I can get to my project, the better.

I would like to build a digitized version of the 'hand crank' style film camera that operates by rotating the crank attached to a rotary encoder. I want to build based on these specs so that the frames per second (FPS) is based on the angle of rotations.

For example: If while rotating the crank lefthanded (clockwise), the rotary encoder will rotate counter-clockwise. And if each full 360° rotation takes 20 pictures, for each 18° counter-clockwise rotation of the rotary encoder the camera would need to record 1 picture. Each picture taken would then be saved to the external SD card module.

The following is my hardware setup and the first result when searching on Amazon:

Board - 

ESP32-WROVER-CAM board 

    - (Referred to as CAMERA_MODEL_WROVER_KIT in the camerawebserver example).

Micro SD Card module -

UMLIFE Micro SD SDHC TF Card Adapter Reader Module 

Rotary Encoder

EC11