kopimojo

Power - Power is all you need. My circuit setup works well with 9V 400mAh. My fully charged battery managed to drive the esp32-cam in the AP mode for 1hr 35 min.  The situation is not at all satisfactory when I connect the MB102 to a 12V 1000mA AC/DC adaptor. The esp32-cam as an AP start dropping out of the WiFi it was serving. I have some problems with my power supply, obviously. I may be needing a couple of decoupling capacitors. I have a few capacitors laying around. I found two 10uF capacitors and they will do for now. I connect one to the MB201 across the 3V3 and GND. The other one across 3V3 and GND of the esp32-cam board. This result in some stability improvement. The esp32-cam AP service seem to hold stable. Now the live streaming stop after a few frames, the still image web service was ok. Perhaps, I may need a bigger capacitor across the MB201 to compensate for the voltage drop when the esp32-cam demands more power. The setup works better when running on e

WiFi - A few months back my cousin came for a short visit. The first thing she asked was "what's the name of your network and password please", apart from the preliminary pleasantries, of course. We were online 24/7, Internet access is a fundamental part of our modern daily life, as running water and electricity. I still remember when I was small, in a short period of my younger days where there was no running water or electricity in our shack of a house. If we can see the radio waves we will see a rainbow of colors. If we can hear WiFi we will hear a symphony of music. Or maybe cacophonic of sounds and hellish pulsating neon colors. Enough dreaming. The good thing about esp32 ( or esp8266) is that we get a WiFi ready computing chip with a price of ... peanuts. What more, it can serve as a WiFi access point and/or a WiFi station. With limited range and duration, it can operate on 9V battery. I'm experimenting with an esp32-cam running on fully charged 9V

ESP32 - I'm using FT232RL USB to serial adapter to connect esp32-cam board. The USB to serial adapter connects directly to the USB port of my laptop. There is no need for USB data cable. The esp32-cam board is connected to FT232RL using four female-female jumper wires, and one jumper wire to connect GPIO0 to GND during erasing and firmware flashing of the esp32-cam. I buy all my electronics components from aliexpress.com , which I am rather happy with the service so far. One can find almost anything there, with hundreds of on-line shops under its umbrella. With only 1% of items "dead on arrival", fast enough delivery time and cheap, I'm happy buying from them. The pins are connected like this: esp32-cam        FT232RL GND                    GND 3V3                      3V3  * UDR                     TXD UDT                     RXD IO0  to GND (erase/flash) * By the way, it's OK to use 5V power on esp32. Remember, to erase and upload firmware t

Esp32-cam - see out of my apartment window. I am testing my esp32-cam, freeform and micropython setup I mentioned yesterday. With some minor timeout adjustments, I managed to get a rather decent live video stream out of it. I was using kazam to capture video stream out of the esp32-cam from  a webpage. You can install kazam on you linux machine using apt install. $ sudo apt install kazam By the way, I do all my projects on linux machines. The esp32-cam was program using micropython as image capture and a web server. It listens on port 80 for live video request  and port 81 for still image. I will write the detail of the code in a later blog post. But as a starter, these are the modules I used in the code. import usocket as soc import uasyncio as sy import camera import time import esp from machine import Pin import gc from Wifi import Wifi Catch you later.

kopimojo - The magic of coffee? At least that's what this blog space is called. But it has nothing to do with magic nor coffee, truth to tell all cool blogspot names were already taken. So it is just another name. I will try to share my hobby esp32/esp8266 micropython projects experience here though. So hello and welcome and I hope it will be enjoyable and useful for both of us. I will be making my circuits in freeform , just for fun and making these projects artsy. I am sorry if they look ugly. I managed to set up a practical freeform wire-frame for esp32-cam today. Yes I know, it is ugly. It was my first try and I think it went out alright. The copper wire frame is connected to the ground. The two negative rails of the MB102 breadboard power supply module were first connected to the bottom part of the frame, then the two ground pins of the esp32-cam. I soldered female pin headers to the copper wire frame. The components were slotted into these female pin headers. Repl