Skip to main content
Stability - My esp32-cam setup is working, but not stable enough. I experienced Wifi signal dropout and intermittent reboot. I have a hunch it was due to brownout. The setup was more stable operating with 9V battery than with power adopter.

I was running the esp32-cam board with 3.3V and yesterday I reconnect the import power terminal to 5V. Guess what, now the setup run with acceptable stability and am happy. If your esp32-cam setup is running unstable then use 5V to power up your board.



Last week,  I received "Mini Dc-dc 12-24v To 5v 3a Step Down Power Supply Module Voltage Buck Converter", ten pieces of them.

Yes, I know it says 12-24V but I succeeded to use the buck converter with 9V battery without any problem. I got 4.5V at V0+ terminal when I soldered the converter to a fix output voltage of 5V. I can get close to 5V when using adjustable operational mode. The negative battery terminal is connected to the GND and the positive to the IN+.

I run an uasyncio web-server on my setup. You can get the code from GitHub. Feel free to download and play around with it. The server listens to port 80, 81 and 82. Port 80 serves the live stream, port 81 is dedicated to clients request for still pictures with or without flash. Port 82 is experimental and can be used to send a control command to the board.

My setup is currently looking uglier than before. I need to design a new freeform to hold my esp32-cam board.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Custom made - Sometimes, it is nice to be able to build custom made things. Thanks to Damien George and all the clever people at micropython.org for making it easy. So that, to custom build a micropython is not that difficult. Why do you want to build customize firmware anyway? Well, you might want to include some functionalities of your own and removed some functionalities from the standard distribution. The choices are there for you to make. I have a few changes that I want to make in micropython. version header -kaki5 (pronounce kaki-lima) an additional thread cleanup function for esp32 add frozen modules CryptoXo and uasyncio remove help, upip, and webrepl camera C module for esp32 camera board These are accomplished by modifying and adding files. py/makeversionhdr.py py/modthread.c extra/CryptoXo.py, extra/uasyncio.py, and manifest.py mpconfigport.h main.c and modcamera.c I also want to remove some modules specifically, help, upip, and webrepl from esp32...
Multi-threading : I previously used an uasyncio webcam server. This time around, I am testing a multi-thread webcam server. The result is promising. A multi-thread server seems to give a better throughput. The program logic is simpler when compared to the server based on uasyncio. The server is a four threaded application, two for port 80, one for port 81, and port 82 runs on the main thread, which blocks the REPL.  You can start a dedicated thread for port 82 if you do not want to block the REPL. I found pix/7 gives the best performance. A spe/2 will reduce the image size but give you a grayscale image. Please see my previous blog if all these seem mysterious to you. I have compiled a new firmware, MicroPython v1.11-571-g7e374d231.  You can download the new firmware from my repository at GitHub. The soft reset is not functioning properly. You need to do a hard reset. I also include four new functions in modcamera.c: pixformat agcgain aelevels aecvalue The pixfo...
Micropython - v1.11-498 introduced a few changes in the source-code directory structure. Changes to specific files, as previously described in esp32-cam , will no longer work. A simple working summary on how to build esp32-cam firmware is described below: Make a recursive copy of ports/esp32 to ports/esp32-cam, and you will need to modify the following files: 1) ports/esp32-cam/main.c 2) ports/esp32-cam/Makefile 3) ports/esp32-cam/modcamera.c 4) ports/esp32-cam/mpconfigport.h 5) ports/esp32-cam/boards/manifest.py 6) ports/esp32-cam/boards/sdkconfig.base Or, you can just download a precompiled Micropython v1.11-498 from firmware.bin at GitHub if you want to save some work. However, I encourage you to compile the firmware yourself. You will learn a lot and you can choose to modify anything to your liking. The modcamera.c includes something new. The still photo was taken using these settings; pix =8, con =2, qua =10, and spe =2. You will understand those parameters, later...