Espressif ESP-EYE Board

Peter ScargillGeneral17 Comments on Espressif ESP-EYE Board

I remember reading, less than a month ago, a blog entry called “The Mysterious ESP-ESP-EYEEYE” in which it is stated that there is no information on the Espressif site on this interesting little camera module. Well, I’ll correct that – there most certainly is now and here’s the link. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp-eye/overview

The ESP-EYE module is a little PCB with a camera and an ESP-32. Rather than print potentially out-of-date info here, I’ll just point you in the right direction for those interested. Here is a link for ordering info, the ESP-EYE Getting Started Guide and the ESP-EYE Reference Design notes all in one place. The ordering info is dated TODAY (Jan31, 2019) and the others are a few days old.

The ESP-EYE has the ESP-32, 2 Megapixel camera, microphone, 7MB of PSRAM and 4Mbyte of Flash. The ESP-EYE supports image transmission over WIFI and debugging through a micro-USB port.

And here it is..

tmp1EF8

There are also three buttons and an on-board 3D antenna..

More soon. At first glance this is looking like another really-committed-users first job – the Getting Started Guide refers to Linux, Mac and Windows PC. Having a “play” involves setting up Eclipse or similar, the toolchain and ESP-IDF from Espressif.

May25, 2020 Update: Finally got around to testing this – of all the boards I have used, both ESP8266 and ESP32, this is the most finicky and my feeling is that this is power related.  Once we finally got it working, there are horizontal lines all over the video and even moving it to a dedicated USB supply, they are still there. Antonio thinks perhaps a capacitor might help but there are no obvious holes or test points on the board to facilitate this.

17 thoughts on “Espressif ESP-EYE Board”

  2. Mine arrived last week. Had no trouble installing and compiling on Linux, I’m not an Arduino guy and messed up initially thinking I needed the Arduino IDE.

    My major issue is I can’t pronounce a Chinese name well enough to wake it up. Even downloading the audio wave file of the name and playing it back it was still iffy to wake it up.

    When I finally managed to wake it up, I could view the camera in a browser on my cell phone after connecting to its WiFi access, but the connection dropped after a few minutes dropping it back into the waiting to wake up loop.

    I posted an issue on GitHub (ESP-Who) and got a quick reply on where to modify the code to always be awake, but I haven’t had a chance to try let.

    Low priority toy for me, and the learning curve will be steeper than I have time for right now since I know nothing about the ESP32 and its libraries.

    Why the desire for these things to be an “access point” wouldn’t the default of DHCP “joining” an IOT network be better? Since you have to compile the code, would be easy enough to do a -D with the login SSID and password. Heck you can buy a WiFi router for like $20 and have a password free “Open Wifi” for IOT playing around.

    I’ll definitely be looking into rtsp link above. I ran across a nice method of weatherproofing Pi Cameras etc. — a Mason Jar like used in home canning. Easy to punch holes in the lid for wires and seal with RTV.

  3. TTGO has a new one too that packs a camera (with options for standard and fisheye lenses), PIR sensor, pressure/temp/humidity (BME280) and an OLED for around $20. I ordered one a couple weeks ago, still waiting for it to show up.

    Interested in combining it with one of those low resolution thermal cameras to make the ultimate multisensor person detector.

          1. And Kevin Hester did the heavy lifting and wrote a nice Arduino IDE library to use the thing for simple RTSP streaming, e.g. using VLC.

            https://github.com/geeksville/Micro-RTSP

            Examples:
            https://github.com/geeksville/Micro-RTSP/tree/master/examples
            https://github.com/geeksville/TenDollarWebcam

            Am waiting currently for Chinese New Year to be over to buy one of those TTgo ones with a fish-eye lens. I’ll put it in an enclosure with a clear plastic cover to be used as an outdoors I-don’t-care-if-it-breaks hummingbird cam.

    2. I’m late to this party, but what low resolution thermal camera? cost?

      IMHO PIR have been a waste of time unless in a real benign environment like indoors with no view of direct sunlight.

  5. Looks like a rework of the M5Stack ESP32 Camera Module OV2640 Type-C Camera Development Board ATF.
    See eBay item #192591918635 £10.10 and no 8 week lead time.

  6. I can buy from Mouser (Netherlands), but I will pass for now. Shipping price is higher than price of product.

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