Hacker's Guide to Buying an ESP32 Camera Module [Tutorial]

if you're interested in picking up one of these great low-cost Wi-Fi camera modules we'll guide you through the most common ESP 32 based development boards on this episode of cyber weapons lab the ESP 32 microcontroller is the Big Brother to the esp8266 which we've covered extensively on the show now this microcontroller is more powerful and also comes with Bluetooth and an additional core for processing and this means capable of a lot more interesting things that the esp8266 just frankly can't do now these camera modules are super cheap they range all the way from the upwards of twenty-five dollars all the way down to about five dollars and counter-intuitively the five dollar one is also capable of doing facial recognition which is incredibly cool on such a low cost development board now today we're going to break down the most common modules you'll find for sale explain the benefits you get for spending a little bit of extra money and show you exactly what you can and can't do with each one because each one has their own individual connector and some of them require an additional purchase in order to effectively program them now in order to follow along you don't really need anything but if you're interested in buying one of these boards you can check out the null byte link in the description to follow along the ESP 32 cam is the classic module people think of when they think of the ESP 32 camera module now this camera is pretty affordable but it does come with a downside that in order to connect to it you need to pick up an FTDI programmer like this one and while that's a little bit annoying you can see that the cost on Amazon is about $12.99 for the whole set and if you want to go even cheaper you can find this camera on all the Express for about five dollars now this is also really cool because this board while it doesn't come with a USB interface making a little bit more annoying to work with than some of our other boards we're going to overview has a lot of advanced functionality because of the presence of the PS Ram now the PS Ram is something that gives it the ability to buffer and stream video in higher quality as well as try out facial recognition this board is a great choice to combine with a low-cost lipo shield which gives you the ability to power this entire camera over a battery or through a micro USB interface and that's really cool if you want to simply just throw one of these together and have it in a hit in place with no wires because it's simple to setup support it on Arduino IDE and very easy to use this ESP 32 camera module that has a USB type-c interface is popping up on Amazon and on Aliexpress and it's based on a design by a m5 stack which is a really reputable vendor with a lot of really interesting and unique designs and this is their lowest cost model which is kind of as I'm suspicious spread to a lot of people that are just making it for very cheap now you can find this for a really low price $12.99 on Amazon and if you look for it on Aliexpress you can find it for about $8 so while this looks really slick and if you're comparing it to the previous board you might want to run out and grab one there's a couple of things you should be aware of in spite of this board being a little bit more basic it's still extremely easy to set up and you can add it to your home assistant if you want to go ahead and use this as a quick to set up security camera there are a lot of things missing from this board that are available on the flagship model that we will cover an event and in general it doesn't have the PS RAM that the ESP 32 cam does have so although it's much more convenient to just connect this to USB type-c and start programming it it isn't capable of running facial recognition and it isn't capable of actually doing high resolution video so if you're needing to use the whole resolution that it's capable of getting you might be disappointed to learn that there's a bottleneck with the RAM and it makes it so that streaming video on this camera module module is not as appealing as just doing so on either the ESP 32 cam or the more expensive model which we'll go over next the ESPI is the official flagship Board of Express F that's looking to cash in on people who are interested in developing facial recognition or other sorts of neural network based microcontroller applications and what that means is this board has a lot of things built in that these other boards just lacked it has a easy to you use micro USB interface you can plug it in and get started immediately it has a microphone which is awesome for being able to recognize voice commands you can even wake up the board and start networking by saying a command to it now this is a little bit less programmable in arduino ide because the vendor really wants you to download and learn their toolkit in order to use it so people might be a little bit disappointed to find that this one is a lot less hackable than some of our other options but it does have better hardware than the other two so if you're looking to get into neural networks or you need a lot of beefy processing power this board might not be a symbol to use but it has a lot more features baked into it and it's basically maxed out all the various things you can populate now as you can see on Amazon the price is pretty hefty compared to the other one and if you look on Aliexpress the difference isn't that stark it's about a dollar between the two so you can expect to pay around thirty four dollars or you can generally find it for a little less if you hunt around but between twenty-five and thirty four dollars is what you can expect to find this board for listed online now if you want to learn more about the ESP AI you can check out the espress F page here that goes into all the details about the hardware what it's capable of and all the various things you can develop on it but what's intriguing about it is that it has automated ways of detecting things like faces or probably things like license plates if you really wanted to develop unique applications for these sorts of boards you can find documentation and example sketches on github so if you want to check out this more expensive board it is much more of an investment than these other ESP 32 cameras we've covered today but it also has a lot of potential in terms of vendor support and the ability to start doing things like using neural networks for facial recognition as you can see while these models may look similar they are all uniquely equipped for a project you might be working on so make sure to pay attention and get the one with the right connector and also the right amount of PS ram for your project because if you're relying on one of these to support facial recognition and you get in more expensive board with a more accessible connector but no PS Ram you're not going to be able to get high-definition video and you won't be able to try out facial recognition that's all we have for this episode of cyber weapons lab make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and if you have any ideas for future episodes send me a message on Twitter because I'd love to hear from you and if you get stuck or if you want to review any of these boards make sure to check out the annul bite article in the description because it's full of details about these boards thanks and we'll see you next time

Channel: Null Byte

Views: 37,083

Keywords: nullbyte, null byte, hack, hacking, hacker, hacks, hackers, how to hack, howto, how to, tutorial, guide, cyber weapon, cyber weapons, cyber, cyber weapons lab, ESP32 Camera Module, esp32 cam, esp32 camera module, esp32 camera, esp32 camera wifi, esp cam, esp camera, esp camera system, esp camera module, esp32 cam arduino, wireless camera, esp32 camera streaming, random nerd tutorials, esp32 cam project, esp32 cam wifi, esp32 camera tutorial, esp32 projects, esp-eye, esp32-cam

Id: UqzdbOcoF7Q

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021