3 Pack ESP32-CAM WiFi + Bluetooth Module Development Board with OV2640 Camera Module

These work fine when programmer from the Arduino IDE using the "AI Thinker ESP32-CAM" board option. All three units worked fine out of the box.Documentation could be better (available?) and as mentioned by others; the manufacturing quality is poor. Not knocking any stars here given the fair price.Some issues/notes I ran across along the way:1. Be prepared to do a little research to get these working- a great place to start are Amazon reviews!2. After programming with an FTDI (3.3v) the unit resets and immediately detects a brownout condition. Simply powering from another source or (with credit to another reviewer here) you can switch over your FTDI to 5.0v (with jumper removed) to get up and running with serial output.3. IF the camera is not detected, this can be an indication that not enough power is available or the camera was not secured properly.4. These can run hot when streaming jpegs- running off a 5V power supply, this was drawing ~.5A using the provided example.5. Be sure to connect to a 2.4Ghz wifi network

So in order to get this to work, in the arduino sketch you select the Camera model AI Thinker. Enter in your ssid and password for your router and make sure you use the 2.4ghz not the 5ghz if you have that option. Program the device using 3.3 volts. Now I had problems running at 3.3 volts, I was getting a brown out error so I moved over my jumper on my FTDI adapter to 5 volts and moved the wire from the esp32 3.3v pin to the 5v pin.Go to the serial monitor on the arduino IDE and press the reset button on the esp32 and hold it for at least 3 seconds then release.You should get info out showing you the IP address that you’re router gave the device.Open chrome or Firefox and enter in that IP address. A screen will come up with all kinds of settings. Go to the bottom of the page and click on the Start Stream button. Now you will see the camera image. Scroll back up and try changing the resolution.Dronebot.com had a very good write up so check him out!I hope this helps someone.

I really like this board. It is capable and inexpensive. It works OK and seems to have a lot of potential uses. There are some big caveats:- It''s fussy about its power supply. It needs more peak current than you might think. Use the 5V pin for power.- No instructions are included. Be prepared to do some research- There are no mounting holes. There's no good way to hold the board.- The camera ribbon is delicate and not robust.- The reset button is on the underside. Reset is not available at a pin.- There's no USB port. A FTDI serial converter board is necessary. Loose wire connections are used.- Supporting software has to be downloaded from multiple locations. It might not be Windows-friendly.

This is a great little camera for the money. I am currently using Arduino IDE 1.8.19 and I didn't have any issues loading this devise. I selected AI_THINKER board and then went into my devise manager to make sure I was using the correct port for down loading. The only issue I had is when I tried to load the code using the Hiletgo FT232RL FTDI adapter...it just would not load. As a work around you can use the Arduino UNO to download a sketch to your camera.

Good value but they are clearly made cheap. Two out of the three show very good camera image quality (better than I expected), but the third was set to a focus of about 10cm so across the room was hard to see what was even there. I tried to turn the lens to see if I could adjust the focus, but I think they are glued in place with a fixed focus point. One of the three is clearly slower at processing the video, about 1/2 the frame rate of the other two. One of the 3 also had the silkscreen so bad, you cannot read the pin labels, but I just used the others as reference. From what I am using them for, these are good and the issues I described above are worth looking past. I will probably order more if these continue to operate for a few weeks as a stability test.