M5Stack Goodness

It’s quite a while since I heard anything from M5Stack but today I have some new goodies from them. First off – this handy little ESP32-based mini-camera: CamS3 5MP Camera.

The device came complete with lead and USB-C adaptor. It costs something like $17 US dollars from their site – no doubt AliExpress will have these at a reasonable price. Being lazy, I didn’t go on the hunt for instructions – there will be plenty – instead I simply plugged the unit into USB on my PC.

I could have used a proper USB supply but this was handy. I then went looking for any new access point appearing on my phone – sure enough – UnitCamS3-WiFi – on the phone I connected to that access point and went to “manage router” in the settings.

A nice simple page appeared at the address 192.168.4.1 – typical of ESP-based devices… a simple demo – but a great start. Not sure at this point what to do with the SD card reference (there is an internal SD card in the unit – it seems) – but I went straight to the yellow STREAM option and on my phone – video appeared – slow – but decent enough. Can’t ask more than that for a starting point.

Possibly a couple of frames a second or more – very clear video from the tiny lense. Once the novelty of watching myself on camera wore off, I went to see if the device would hook up to my WiFi…. but first, I had to try the LED.

I selected the LED button by touching my phone screen and… yes, the bright blue LED visible on initial power up went off. Another press and it came back on.. Had this been Apollo Automation they’d have put a full RGB LED in there for good measure. Clearly there’s a microphone built into the unit as you can record audio as well as video – see the menu above left.

At the bottom of the menu – I noted an item called “Image Poster”. “Posting captured image to ezDATA regularly” – with a SETUP button. Whatever next?

Well, it seems in this demo you can select your WiFi and post images at a user defined period. I could not see how to actually put the demo unit onto one of my access points though it was easy to refer to one of them for the purpose of saving images.

Of course – the software installed on the unit is just a demo and I’m sure on the site will be a complete library. More info here…

So I went to the image poster menu item and connected the camera to one of my access points. This seemed to work because the UnitCamS3-WiFi disappeared from my network – but when I went to my router I could not find a new device attached to the network.

Plenty of “unknown” devices but nothing I could identify as this ESP-based camera and of course the camera access point no longer appeared on my phone. I power-cycled the unit – no change. Nothing.

Looks like I’ll have to break down and look for info. Oh, there’s a snap-on bracket on the back – removing this revealed nothing. For now, that’s it, I plan to look more deeply into the UnitCam-S3 soon.