esp32 with camera and tft display factory

A beautiful 3.5” touchscreen display, based on ESP32-WROVER, with a built-in 2M pixel OV2640 camera, makes it an ever perfect platform for your ESP32 projects.

Makerfabs ESP32 3.5” Touch with camera is absolutely open for makers, and besides, Makerfabs provide plenty of Demos to help the users on the usage. Have a try at this fantastic display in your next ESP32 project!~

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ESP32 development boards with a camera are becoming very popular among the maker community. There are several models with different features like microSD card support, microphone, screen, and much more for a very reasonable price. These boards allow you to build projects with image, video streaming, face recognition and detection, and other AI applications. Do you know what’s the best ESP32 camera board for your project?

All cameras have an OV2640 camera and usually, these come with a small flex cable. There are camera probes sold separately with longer flex cables and with a fish-eye lens. The fish-eye lens capture a wider area, which is really useful for surveillance projects.

The ESP32-CAM AI-Thinker is one of the most popular ESP32 development boards with a camera – it comes with a lot of useful features and costs around $7 or less!

It features an ESP32-S chip and comes with a “regular” 2MP OV2640 camera. This board has 4MB PSRAM, which is used for buffering images from the camera into video streaming or other tasks and allows you to use higher quality in your pictures without crashing the ESP32.

It supports a microSD cardand has 10 accessible GPIOs and power pins. However, not all GPIOs can be used because some are either being used by the camera or by the microSD card. So, you need to be careful with which GPIOs you’ll use.

The ESP32-CAM board comes with an on-board antenna, but also with an IPEX connector allowing you to alternatively use an external antenna to improve the Wi-Fi communication range.

The board comes with an on-board reset button to restart your board and a built-in LED that works as a flash lamp. The flash lamp can be useful to light up the area before streaming video or taking a picture. However, the flash lamp shares its GPIO with one of the microSD card GPIOs. This means that when using functions related to the microSD card, the LED will light up occasionally, even when you don’t want it.

One of the major drawbacks of the ESP32-CAM is that it doesn’t have USB-to-UART interface. This means that you can’t connect the ESP32-CAM directly to your computer using a USB cable. You need to use an FTDI programmer. Nonetheless, this is one of the most versatile and cheapest ESP32 development boards with a camera.

This development board comes with the ESP32-Wrover-E chip (with PSRAM). It comes with the OV2640 camera and it is easy to use and set up. It has a USB-to-UART converter so it’s straightforward to upload code to the board. You just need to connect a USB cable to the board and connect it to your computer to upload code or apply power. There’s no need for extra circuitry or an FTDI programmer.

It comes with several exposed GPIOs if you want to connect other peripherals. Additionally, if you’re not using the camera, you can use it as a regular ESP32 with a wide number of available GPIOs. It comes with RESET and BOOT buttons, which makes it easy to reset the board or put it in flashing mode if needed.

This board is very handy, the only downside is that it doesn’t come with a microSD card slot. However, as it comes with a wide number of available GPIOs, you can easily connect an external microSD card module if needed.

When programming this board using Arduino IDE, make sure you select the board ESP32 Wrover Module and in the partition scheme select Huge APP (3MB No OTA/1MB SPIFFS).

Just with 21mm by 41mm, it is equipped with a 2 MP OV2640 camera, on-board microphone, reset, boot, and function buttons, and two LEDs. It features 4MB Flash, 8MB PSRAM, and a Micro USB type-C connector (easy to upload code). It comes with on-board antenna and IPEX connector if you want to add an external antenna.

One of the greatest advantages of this board is the USB type-C connector—fast and easy to upload code to the board; the microphone allows you to add voice features to your projects; and 8MB PSRAM ensures that your board doesn’t crash when using higher image quality settings. The major drawback is the price.

There are several different versions of M5-Stack ESP32 boards with cameras. The M5-Camera A or M5-Camera B like all the other boards featured here comes with the OV2640 camera. It has 4MB PSRAM—so, you shouldn’t have problems taking pictures and streaming with higher quality.

It comes inside a LEGO-style enclosure and features a grove connector ideal to connect other M5-Stack expansions like a microphone, the MPU6050 gyroscope/accelerometer, or a BME280 temperature, humidity and pressure sensor.

The USB type-C connector makes it easy and fast to upload new code to the board. It comes with an external RST button to restart the board and doesn’t have exposed GPIOs.

The greatest advantage of this board is that it has a more finished project look when compared with the other boards. It doesn’t have visible electronics components or wires and if you want to add a BME280 sensor, a gyroscope, or a microphone, you won’t have any wires, you just need to use the grove connector.

The TTGO T-Camera Plus comes with all the functionalities we would want in such a development board and for a very reasonable price. The board comes with microSD card support, a microphone, support for a 3.7V lithium battery as well as a battery management circuit, a 1.3 TFT display (color screen), microUSB interface, and on-board reset button.

It comes with some exposed GPIOs that were used to connect to an on-board BME280 sensor. However, the sensor would get really hot on the board, so the manufacturer decided to remove the sensor but you still get access to the GPIOs, so you can connect other I2C peripherals. These GPIOs are also accessible via grove connector.

Finally, the board has an on-board antenna, but also an IPEX connector if you want to add an external antenna. When we got our board it came loaded with an example that shows what the camera “sees” on the screen. This is a very versatile board and we really like it. Read our in-depth review of the TTGO T-Camera Plus.

This camera features a OV2640 camera, a 0.96 inch SSD1306 OLED display, a grove connector (ideal to connect I2C devices), a battery connector, a PIR motion sensor, an on-board RESET button, and a function button connected to GPIO 34. It also features 8MB PSRAM, but it doesn’t support a microSD card.

If you want to include some motion detection in your projects, this is the camera to go with. For more details, you can take a look at the camera GitHub page.

The TTGO T-Journal is a $12-$15 ESP32 Camera Development Board with an OV2640 camera, an external antenna, an I2C SSD1306 0.91 inch OLED display, some exposed GPIOs, function button, a battery connector, and a micro-USB interface.

The OLED display is a great addition to the board. You can display the board IP address, or any errors while debugging. There are four accessible GPIOs. Two of them are for I2C communication and the other two are perfect to connect servo motors (you can also connect other peripherals).

This board also comes with a connector to connect a 3.7V lithium battery. Uploading code is easy with this board because it comes with a USB connector that can be used both for uploading code and for power. You also have a function button connected to GPIO 32 that you program in your code to trigger any task you want.

Note: at the moment, it’s a bit difficult to get this board. I think this board won’t be produced anymore and it’s currently not available to buy on places like amazon. It’s better to get a board with PSRAM.

This is another ESP32 board with a camera from M5-Stack. This ESP32-Camera doesn’t have PSRAM. In practical terms, this means the camera is not able to do face recognition and detection and doesn’t support picture resolution higher than SVGA (800×600). You may also have a hard time with video streaming. Some people reported that his camera heats up very fast with video streaming. Usually, when you get one of these boards, you also get a heat sink precisely because of that.

In this article, we’ve reviewed 8 different ESP32 camera development boards. All boards feature the OV2640 2MP camera and you can program them using Arduino IDE. The best camera for you will really depend on your project requirements. We compiled all this information so that it’s easier for you to pick up the best board for what you have in mind.

In our opinion, the ESP32-CAM AI-Thinker is the most versatile for beginners (and it’s also cheaper) but it needs an FTDI programmer to upload code, or an ESP32-CAM MB programmer. If you don’t want to use the FTDI programmer there are other boards to choose from, I personally like the Freenove ESP32 Wrover board.

The TTGO T-Plus is the one with more functionalities: microphone, microSD card, a color screen, and much more. If you don’t intend to connect any peripherals to your board, the M5-camera might be a better option (and you can easily connect other M5-stack expansions). At this point, taking into account the variety of available boards, I would not choose a board without PSRAM.

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The ESP32 Touch Cam Module is a beautiful 3.5” touchscreen display, based on ESP32-WROVER, with a built-in 2M pixel OV2640 camera, which makes it an excellent platform for ESP32 projects. It is a pretty sleek and good looking module that can be used in several different display based projects. It comes up with a built-in micro SD card slot because an SD card is required for Image Capturing and Streaming purposes. It has an onboard CP2102 programmer and other display and Capacitive connectors on the backside.

It has ILI9488 as the 3.5” 320x480 TFT LCD driver which uses SPI for communication with ESP32. The SPI main clock could be up to 60M~80M, which makes the display smooth enough for videos. The camera OV2640 with pixel 2M can make applications such as remote photography, face recognition, etc. The module also has GPIO pins which we can use with the breakout connectors to connect the ESP32 display with sensors/actuators. The ESP32 TFT Touch support Arduino or MicroPython programming. The module we are using here has a Capacitive Touch, you can also get the module with resistive touch as well.

Coming to some more components on the module we have an NS2009 touch screen controller which is a 4-wire screen controller with an I2C interface. Apart from that, we have an FS6232 Two way MP motherboard Clock Generator IC which generates all clocks required for single and two-way multiprocessor platforms. Some important specifications of this module are as given below:-

A while ago, I decided to try out the examplebut found it broken. A lot of library dependencies were missing. It turns out that Espressif had overhauled theiresp-facerepo intoesp-dl, and focused more on the more expensive ESP-EYE.You can find instructions in the original repo orthis articleof how to train your own TinyML model onEdge Impulse. After download the deployed Arduino library, change the imported library name in my script.

I copied the necessary files and made it work. But it is still not an elegant solution; you have to view the image in a browser, on a computer connected to the same (stable) WiFi. And you need to refresh the page (send a new request) in order to get a new photo.

At first it was not successful, since most examples useTJpg_Decoderand it use a lot of memory, causing the ESP32-CAM crash then reboot. Then I found out that there"s an function from the ESP32 library to convert JPEG into RGB565 (which is the format used by the Adafruit driver). I can even scale the image to 1/2 side size (= 1/4) so it fit the ST7735S 160x128 or 128x128 displays nicely. Everything works and problem solved.

You can find some more details about wiring, the training data (Kaggle Cats and Dogs Dataset) and the model (MobileNetV1 96x96 0.25 with transfer learning) on my repo. There"s also a copy of my model library and a boilerplate version (without using button and TFT).

The train accuracy is 89.8% and test accuracy is 86.97% on Edge Impulse. Captured image is 240x240 (resized to 120x120 on TFT and 96x96 for the model). Model inference (predict) time on ESP32-CAM is 2607 ms (2.6 secs). It"s not fast, but the setup is so cheap I think this can actually be useful as real world applications...?

Probably because of to low voltage under upload, you have to use 5 volt not 3.3 volt on your ftdi uploader. I made the same error and got same result as you did. After setting ftdi to 5 volt it worked fine.

I have updated the arduino IDE to 1.8.9 and ESP32 boards as per instructions, but cant find the problem. If you have any ideas I really appriecate it.

Hi Dan, yes I took Sara’s advice and selected the correct camera module in the code but commenting out the ones that don’t apply. I did also find reducing the upload speed made things more stable. I think my programmer is not the best.

Hi Dan, did you found the solution. I also purchase two units with different brand with same issue. (the first one have successed before but when retry to reupload the issue came).

Try all suggestions here by changing board selection, changging cable, changging programmer device, changging pins selection, try with different PC and all have same problem.

Any update on card sizes??? Brand name 4 GB cards are special order. When I find 4GB they are almost as expensive as 16/32GB sizes. Ebay takes forever anymore, and then you don’t know what you are getting. No name brand on Ali Express or Banggood.

Any way you know of to see the video stream or stills via a TFT display on another ESP through web browser or otherwise? I’ve used ESPNow between ESP12’s or 32’s for display of thermal cam images but they’re much smaller. Avoids need for phone or laptop tied up….

2. When I put it manually through extracting the zip file and moved it to my Arduino libraries folder, then compile the code, I got “no headers files (.h) found” error

Alternatively, if you have the latest updated ESP32 add-on, you should have the code in your examples. Go to File > Examples > ESP32 > Camera and open the CameraWebServer example.

I was looking for something like this for my recent project, Thanks! Great tutorial! But I think ESP32-CAM is “unofficial” combination of ESP32 with a camera. I think Espressif themselves released a dedicated “official” ESP32+camera board called ESP-EYE with their own “official” software library called ESP-WHO.

Have not tried that board myself. Can you make a tutorial on that as well since that is the “official” hardware and software and would have longer support from Espressif itself.

We haven’t fully tested the ESP-EYE yet. We’ve played with the example firmware that they provide and we made a blog post about it that you can read here: https://makeradvisor.com/esp-eye-new-esp32-based-board/

Try to check the cable, connections, power source … etc. If you can, try to measure the voltage that goes directly to the pins on the ESP32CAM board. It should be the closest to 5 Volt.

Thanks, it will be of great help, recently I was able to integrate my esp32 cam into an MQTT client library, every face detected a publisher is sent to the broker

Rolling back to the 1.01 core and using the example program belonging to that core, will ‘fix’ it (currently that is the program that Sara and Rui have on their Github

I’ve selected AI Thinker in the code and reduced the upload to 115200. Anyone have some insights? I have a M5Stack Camera which works pretty well with the code but these two are dead.

Hi! good tutorial!, I need to put the upload speed 115200 and the flash frequency in 40Mhz to avoid a Guru Meditation Error: Core 0 panic’ed (InstrFetchProhibited) error if someone have the same problem