Aug 132019
 

I’m getting back around to some of my electronics stuff and I was discouraged that the Lolin32 I was using had been discontinued. In retrospect I probably should have used ESP8266 as the basis for WiFi LED control, but meh.

So anyway, I recently found a new board to get excited about, plus a few battery modules that haven’t actually come in yet. The ESP32-CAM has most of what I’d want in a board for simple bots; camera, wifi, and enough GPIO to control a few servos and an onboard flash LEDs. I got my first one in last weekend and spent it trying to get the basic functions for a FPV bot down.

Took me a while to cobble together the functions I needed from available docs and example code, but I’ve got a sketch that does the following:
~Connect to WiFi (SSID\PW hardcoded for now)
~Start camera stream
~Start UDP listener, parse and process incomming packets
~Servo motor control (2) currently
~LED control, onboard RED (ON\OFF) and WHITE (PWM)

Here’s the code I’ve got so far- be warned; like all my code- it’s a nightmare, but it works for me. I left some notes and links to other code I scavenged, but there’s a lot more to do and I honestly don’t even get how the camera stream is working in this sketch, but it does, so good enough for now.

The biggest downside of this board for me is it doesn’t have a built in USB interface so I have to use TX\RX pins to load code, but that’s not too big a deal. Though since only have the one ESP32-Cam at the moment and I’m leaving that one the breadboard for testing. I’ve ordered a few more since they’re so cheap- next one I get will go on this little robot platform I found online and printed. I actually found this design online some time ago and saved the files, but now I can’t figure out where I found it, so if anyone knows this design and has a link to it please let me know.

Hopefully I’ll post more because hopefully I’ll do more, but this is something and I figure if anyone else out there is messing with an ESP32-CAM out there they may find this marginally useful. If by some chance you are working with this board feel free to contact me, it’s got some great potential.