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.
![](http://funkboxing.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/IMG_20190812_182338709.jpg)
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.
![](http://funkboxing.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/IMG_20190812_182435102.jpg)
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.