Yes there are.
This guy had a brilliant idea to use a fake camera as an enclosure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36p9To2hfak
[EDIT]
I just discovered that the board has also a small red led (GPIO33 inverted) that can be usefull as a status led. The main led is controlled by GPIO4
Yes there are pins available for sure. Check this page for the pin details.https://esphome.io/components/esp32_camera.html?highlight=camera
The ones that are not in use can be used for sensors. (like OI16, 4,2,12,13). Plan to test it this weekend
As @marco9446 states OI4 is used for the main LED and may not be generally available
Is it possible to use this with a Wyze camera? No idea what the brain of one of those is…
I think one can use the ports for the SD-Card. I would like to add a camera to this ESPHOME and a Hörmann Garage door
I’ll order one
For those that want a howto, here goes. It’ll be pretty brief as most the actual setup in esphome is covered by @OttoWinter in the esphome docs.
As said above my device is this https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1pcs-ESP32-CAM-WiFi-WiFi-Module-ESP32-serial-to-WiFi-ESP32-CAM-Development-Board-5V-Bluetooth/32955484091.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.79984c4dNbGPlZ
These things are all over aliexpress. This particular one is around US$10 and seems to be identical to the Ai-Thinker design.
These particular boards have no usb port attached (unlike many esp32 dev boards). Therefore to join it to your esphome computer you need a USB to Serial programmer. The best ones seem to have the CP2102 chip. Again there are plenty of places to buy these. They have four pins to connect to the ESP32-Cam board.
CP2102 ESP32-CAM
3v3 3v3
GND GND
RXD UOT
TXD UOR
Also you need to short GPIO0 to GND when doing the initial serial flash to put it in programming mode. Don’t forget to unshort it when restarting. Once we have done the initial USB flash, all future flashing can be done OTA, so make sure you include OTA in your esphome yaml file. Thanks to the author of this page for those wiring details: https://robotzero.one/esp32-cam-arduino-ide/
After that is all done, write a yaml file including the camera setup from here - I copied and pasted the AI-Thinker example and it worked perfectly. https://esphome.io/components/esp32_camera.html
After you have flashed and restarted (not forgetting to unshort GPOI0) you should get a device appearing in home assistant via Integrations. Once you add the new device, there will be a camera entity.
Hope this helps someone.
I have one also and got it to work but it is not stable, after a couple of hours it needs to be reset.
Which board did you select when setting it up under esphome? I chose esp-wrover-kit but I’m unsure if that is the correct one.
esp32dev, but I am by no means sure what is right.
Thank you, seems to work, I will let you know tomorrow if it needed to be reset.
Thanks you, choosing esp32dev did the trick, it’s been on since last night.
Waiting for someone to round this out as a project that includes IR lighting, day / night mode switching and is generally stable for continuous use.
This would make having MANY cameras very inexpensive.
I’d love to see such a project, too.
but you’ll most likely need a reasonable expensive WiFi AP/router to cope with MANY camera streams…
Depends on the bitrate and resolution. I have a multiple AP Ubiquiti setup one of the easier ways getting around wifi bandwidth is to have more APs spread out near the devices at low power so they do not overlap.
However you are correct that streaming is really hard on wifi.
Hence my wish for a POE ethernet version!
hello
I bought one of these esp32 cam boards off amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-M5Stack-Antenna-Arduino-Raspberry/dp/B07F2DNX6M/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?keywords=M5Stack+ESP32+Camera+Module&qid=1554793385&s=electronics&sr=1-1-spons&psc=1
However i cannot get it to flash, i presume the reset button should set it to flash mode, can anyone confirm or as anyone used one like this?
The board comes preprogrammed as an access point but you can only get live stream from the 192.168.4.1 address no config options, so can only have an adhoc connection.
cheers
I have that exact same board and just held the reset button while plugging it in that seemed to put it in flash mode.
I used a USB C to micro USB adaptor.
There are plenty of options about, eg this one with an OLED, a PIR sensor and two buttons, for about US$20, ie roughtly twice the price of the bare unit with the fairly un-useful SD card reader.
If anyone has got this particular board [TTGO-Camera] that Nick’s suggested to work I’d be grateful for seeing the ESPHome config you used. Flashing it with a USB cable from the ESPHome web manager interface is fine - no button pressing or anything else was needed, but the particular camera won’t correctly reply to the SCCB probe, and so fails to configure correctly. It happily does all the other things it should (talks to HA, syncs time, provides web server i/f etc).
I can’t determine if it’s the ov2640 camera itself that isn’t defined in the source perhps, or if it’s because the BME220 chip is not present (which seems unlikely) on the examples I have. The boards all worked OK on delivery with their supplied app software, so I don’t have any reason to suppose they are actually defective as such.
this is what I have for the TTGO, I’m not able to get the camera image though, it say it’s sending it in the logs but I never get it in HA.
esphome:
name: camera
platform: ESP32
board: esp-wrover-kit
wifi:
ssid: ""
password: ""
ap:
ssid: camera_test
# Enable logging
logger:
# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
ota:
esp32_camera:
name: My Camera
external_clock:
pin: GPIO32
frequency: 20MHz
i2c_pins:
sda: GPIO13
scl: GPIO12
data_pins: [GPIO4, GPIO5, GPIO14, GPIO15, GPIO18, GPIO23, GPIO36, GPIO39]
vsync_pin: GPIO27
href_pin: GPIO25
pixel_clock_pin: GPIO19
power_down_pin: GPIO26
resolution: 640x480
jpeg_quality: 10
i2c:
sda: GPIO21
scl: GPIO22
font:
- file: "Ubuntu-Regular.ttf"
id: ubuntu
size: 20
display:
- platform: ssd1306_i2c
model: "SSD1306 128x64"
address: 0x3C
lambda: |-
it.print(0, 0, id(ubuntu), "Hello World!");
sensor:
- platform: bme280
temperature:
name: "BME280 Temperature"
oversampling: 16x
pressure:
name: "BME280 Pressure"
humidity:
name: "BME280 Humidity"
address: 0x77
update_interval: 60s
binary_sensor:
- platform: gpio
pin: GPIO33
name: "PIR Sensor"
device_class: motion
I think from the last photo in the aliexpress listing for the TTGO with PIR etc that this should be
data_pins: [GPOIO5, GPIO14, GPIO4, GPIO15, GPIO18, GPIO23, GPIO36, GPIO39]
ie, the same order as in the pic. This is a parallel data bus, so order will be important.
PS I ordered one, when the canoe arrives with it I’ll give it a try!