XIAO ESP32S3 Sense - Tiny ESP32 Camera

today in the workshop we're examining the uino Shia esp32 S3 sense board you'll see how we can use the Shia's camera microphone SD card and touch switch to build a camera that takes pictures and Records sound we'll also upgrade the camera module for improved performance good things come in small packages so welcome to the workshop well hello and welcome to the workshop and today we're going to be working with an esp32 camera board now when you think about esp32 camera Boards of course the first thing that comes to mind is the AI thinker board the esp32 cam for $9 this board is an incredible value and yes you can still get it for $9 if you order it from places like AliExpress if you buy it from a local vendor chances are it'll be a bit more but even at that case it is a great value so new esp32 camera boards really have a lot to live up to while this new board we're working with today is from Seed Studio and it's the ceduo Shia esp32 S3 sense board and this board costs $5 more than the esp32 cam board but for that extra five bucks you do get quite a few different features for example this board has a USBC connector whereas the esp32 cam required an adapter or an ftdi adapter in order to connect to it this board also has a built-in microphone which the esp32 cam does not and one really neat feature of this board is that you can power it with a 3.7 volt LiPo battery and you can recharge the battery using the USBC so I think that's great so what we're going to do today is take a look at the cedo Shia esp32 cense board the Cino Shia esp32 S3 cense actually consists of two boards a camera module and the Shia ESP 32 S3 board itself the camera model has a standard ov2640 camera on it it also has a digital mems microphone and a Micro SD card there are also two additional gpio pins on the camera module the esp32 S3 sense board has an esp32 S3 R8 microcontroller 8 MB of pseudostatic RAM and 8 MB of flash Ram an onboard battery charger with an indicator it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth the board has a USBC connector it also has an antenna connector and a small board to board connector for attaching the camera module the sh board has two very tiny push buttons a reset button and a boot Button there are also two LEDs a red LED that is both the power LED and a charging indicator for the battery as well as an Amber user LED at the bottom of the board we can see the UFL connector for the antenna and the board to board connector for the camera module the top of the board is dominated by the USBC connector which provides both d data and power connectivity most of the pins on the ceduo Shia esp32 S3 have multiple purposes and this board has the same pinouts as the other members of the ceduo Shia family note that the 5 volt line is both an input and an output you can use it to power the board but you'll need to insert a shot key diode in series it can also be used as an output from the USBC connector note that there is no output here when the board is being being powered by a battery the 3.3 volts is an output from the board not an input there are a number of connections on the bottom of the board as well there are additional connections for the USBC bus the connections for the battery are on the bottom of the board there are a number of connections that come from the board to board connector and there is also a thermal pad where you can measure the temperature of the board the camera module has an ADD additional two gpio connections when discussing the seedu O Shia esp32 S3 sense board inevitably the comparison with an esp32 cam will come up here's how they compare as you can see from this chart the ceduo Shia ESP 32 S3 sense board is in most cases the same or more features than the ESP 32 cam the one exception seems to be the white flash LED which the esp32 cam has and which is not included on the Shia board the sedino Sha es32 S3 sense is packaged with a stick on antenna the onboard camera can be upgraded to a 5 megapixel ov5640 module you can also buy the Shia esp32 S3 sense board separately without the camera module so now let's start using the ceduo Shia esp32 S3 sense board now one thing I've always been amused by with sedino products is the way that they package them they look like something that you'd find at the checkout stand in the supermarket uh hanging on a little shelf but this is the package that the ceduo Shia esp3 cents comes in and uh when you open it up this is what you get inside the package we have the Shia itself which is the little board over here now it doesn't come with any header pin solded onto to it nor are there header pins in the package so you're going to have to solder some pins on yourself uh as you can see the board we can see it's main features the USBC connector the antenna connector and the little board to board connector over here it's very difficult to see but there are indeed a couple of push buttons across here they're very very tiny uh if we flip it over we can see the connections on the bottom that uh I showed you in the explainer including the larger ones here for the back battery and a thermal pad where you can measure the temperature of the board if we take a look at the camera board it's also of course a very tiny little thing it's got the standard camera on it over here underneath the camera you can see the USBC connection and uh if we flip the bottom you'll see the connector for the uh on the board to board connector here as well as a couple of extra solder pads as well and this is the little antenna that they give you personally I I think this is sort of the weak spot of the system it's not a particularly good antenna but because it uses a standard u.fl connector you could use another antenna as well so this is what you get when you unpackage a ceduo Shia esp32 sense board now here's a visual comparison between the Cino Shia esp32 S3 sense board and a couple of other popular esp32 camera boards that we've worked with before here in the Drone box Workshop now the center one here of course is the famous esp32 cam board the one you're probably the most familiar with as you can see size-wise it's about double the size of the sedino Sha uh otherwise it's a pretty similar board it's got the micro SD card underneath the camera in a similar fashion to the way the Sha does it has that nice big white LED that you use for a flash it's the only one of these boards that has that and on the bottom over here here we've got an antenna connection and a built-in antenna and you use these resistors over here these surface mount ones you change the position in order to select the antenna that you're going to use now this board of course does not have a USB connector on it you need an external ftdi adapter or a plug-in adapter with a USB on it now this board over here that we've used in a few projects is the espi and in many ways it's more of a better comparison to the ceduo board because this board also has the M's microphone on it the way that the ceduo board has and uh so you can see it's about twice the size again of the sh board uh it's got a little connector in the back it's got a micro USB down over here and this is the antenna Arrangement on this board over here you only have the choice of an internal one it also doesn't have that many gpio connections on it as well so the Cino beats it in that in fact the ceduo has as many gpios as the esp32 cam board so at any rate you can see for the size comparison the Cino does indeed win except for this big large antenna over here otherwise uh you could see that we've now got another board in the ever expanding family of esp32 cameras now I've got a couple of accessories over here that you can use with the new sedino SHA board and you can use these accessories with any s inoa they're for the Cino sha family now the first one over here is a prototyping board and we've used this one before the Sha itself sits over here on the board and if you can see there's some little pins on the board here if you look on the bottom of the ceduo Sha right underneath the USB you'll see some little pins and these make contact with it and allows the USB to power the rest of the board and this board's pretty neat it's got a uh OLED display on it a push button a buzzer it's got a number of connections for i squar c and uart over here using the Grove connection system and this is a system that Seed Studio uses for a number of its different products it's got a connector for a liveo battery over here on the bottom of it it's got a Micro SD card and a coin cell connector so it's a really great way to prototype some of the ceduo Sha stuff another prototyping board which uh I just think is really cute and is bound to be used on an episode of the dronebot workshop is this one over here this round circle is actually a round OLED display and if you flip over the back it's got a socket on it over here for the ceduo Sha it's got a connector for an external battery it's got a connector for a coin cell another micro SD connector on it over here an onoff switch and so you can build yourself a really neat uh meter or maybe even an oversized watch using something like this so these are a couple of prototyping accessories that work for all the ceduo Sha boards including the new ceduo Shia esp32 S3 cents okay now that we know a little bit more about our new ESP cam board let's put it to use now the first thing we need to do of course is set up our Arduino IDE and that's pretty simple because this board doesn't require its own boards manager it uses the expressive esp32 board manager now you're going to need to have the latest version of that boards manager so make sure yours is updated but otherwise the only thing we need to do in the IDE is make a setting for the PS or pseudostatic RAM and we're good to go so let's go and do that and give our camera a quick test now before we can start using our new esp32 S3 sense board with the Arduino ID we're going to need to set a few things up the first thing is to make certain that we've identified the device correctly and my setup has identified it correctly as a Shia esp32 S3 but it's quite possible that when you plug it in it'll be identified as a different esp32 you don't need a separate boards manager for this product just a standard esp32 boards manager will work and you just need to go in and make certain that you've actually selected a Shia esp32 S3 and not another esp32 S3 that might come up instead now now the second thing you need to do and this is very important is we need to set it up to use pseudostatic or Ps Ram so go into tools and then go down where it says PS Ram you'll notice mine says disabled that's wrong we want to set it to Opi PS Ram like this over here and once you've made those two settings we can start using this chiduo sha esp32 S3 with our Arduino IDE now one situation you might find arises from time to the time is that you're using your ceduo Shia and all of a sudden you try to upload to it and it's not available this little idiosyncrasy happened to me a couple of times and it can be resolved by putting the Sha into bootloader mode and I'll show you how to do that now as I've mentioned before there are two incredibly tiny switches on the sh there's a boot key right over here I'm not sure if you can see it's this little silver dot what you need to do is you need to press this down I'm using the pointer from my tablet here there and you insert the USB with the power and then release the boot Button and that should put it into boot loader mode now again it's a very very tiny little switch you'll have to find something non-conductive uh to use on it I use the little pointer from my tablet because it's non-conductive uh certainly don't use a little screw driver or something cuz you could short something out but it's just something you'll run into every now and then one other little idiosyncrasy I ran into was a couple of times I uploaded the sketch and nothing happened and it was simply resolved by pulling out and putting back in the USBC Now it only happened a few times to me but I thought I'd pass it on to you just in case you're run into the same situation now to test out the ESP 32 S3 sets camera the easiest thing to do is to use the camera web server sketch and that's exactly what we're going to do now you need to have a recent copy of this sketch because it needs to have the definition for the ceduo Shia camera and this is the definition for it over here and you can take a look in your camera pins file to see if you actually have that here it is on 179 of the camera pins file and it's of course got all the various pinouts that it needs for the ceduo Shia esp32 S3 fre sense board now the only other thing we need to do to camera web server is to give it the SSID and the password or you could consider using Wi-Fi manager as I showed you in my earlier video and eliminate the need to put SSID and password into it but I'm just going to do it the standard way I'm going to load it up to my camera board and we'll see what it looks like and so I've loaded camera web server onto the Shia esp32 S3 sense board and here's the setup that I'm going to be using to demonstrate it I've got a few things for the sh to look at right now I've got a multimeter over here which is got some nice orangish yellow on it plus it's got the red and black leads we've got my robot with his blue background and his red arms and his white eyes over here and you can even see some of the labels on the side over here so it gives it a variety of things to look at and I've just got it mounted over here on a magnetic clip uh again it's not the easy eest camera in the world to mount because it flaps around over here but of course if you're building a project out of it you'd find some way of sensing it I'm using a better quality antenna right now cuz I find that it gives me a better video stream and we can go and take a look at camera web server I'm going to take a 640 by 480 and I will start my stream and we'll take a look at my stream and the stream doesn't look too bad I'm getting some pretty good colors on both the robot background and on the side of the multimeter the red and the black leads look pretty good I guess the um labels are a little bit off the side we'll just turn our camera around a little bit to see what we can see it's a little out of the range for it but all in all not too bad it's pretty well what you would expect from the ESP 32 cam uh the quality is about the same the stream quality is about the same uh so there you have a very tiny ESP 32 cam in the form of the ceduo Sha ESP p32 S3 sense board so now that we've got our esp32 S3 sense board working it's time to actually put it to use now there are a number of things of course that you could build with a board like this and Seed Studio has some great projects that use Edge impulse with this board now you may recall Edge impulse was a product that we used a little while ago in order to do object detection with esp32 cameras and of course you can do that with this new camera as well another thing you can do is you can do sound detection and train it on audio because of course this device has a built-in microphone now those experiments are quite well detailed on the Seed Studio Wii for this product and I'll leave you a link to that in the article accompanying this video but we're not going to go through those experiments today there's really no point in repeating that instead I put together a little experiment that uses a number of the main elements of this board what it is is a camera it's a still picture camera but when you take a picture it also records 10 seconds of audio to go along with this picture and in order to use everything on this board we've already used the camera the microphone and the SD card we're also going to use the touch switch and so the touch switch is how you're going to initiate a picture it's just an experiment but you could actually turn it into a practical product so let's go and take a look at the different elements in this experiment see how we hook it up and then I'll show you the code for it the Sha makes use of the popular ov2640 camera module this is the same module that is used in the ESP 32 cam this module was originally released in 2005 by omnivision in 2009 omnivision discontinued the ov2640 but it's still available from many other manufacturers one of the reasons for the camera's popularity is that it has internal Hardware jpeg compression this can reduce the size of the image by up to 25 times making it much easier for microcontrollers to process it the ov2640 has a/4 in sensor and it has a 1600x 1200 array of pixels it's capable of SVGA or 800x 600 resolution at 30 frames per second to work with this module we'll be using the camera Library which is included in the Arduino IDE when you install the esp32 board manager I won't even begin to read you off the parts number of the microphone on the board I think it sets the record for the longest part number I've ever seen this is a mems or micro El electrical mechanical microphone mem's microphones are integrated circuits that are etched to have a microphone on them with all the mechanical elements etched onto the circuit chip it has a PDM digital output the microphone uses the i s interface if you're not familiar with iqu s I've done a video on using it with the esp32 and you might want to check that out this mems microphone has a maximum sound pressure level of 140 DB we'll be working with this using the i2s library which is also included when you install the esp32 boards manager our project will also use a Micro SD card we can accept micro SD cards with a maximum size of 32 GB you must format the micro SD with fat 32 one of the easiest ways of doing this is to use the Microsoft Windows File Manager but there are also other utilities that can assist you with this as with all CD cards our micro SD uses the SPI bus and we'll be using a number of libraries with it the SPI Library the SD library and the fs library for the file system all of these are already included in your IDE and finally our project will rely on touch switches the ceduo Sha has nine touch switch inputs these switches have an adjustable sensitivity there are many touch switch examples in the sample code and you should check them out in our case we're going to be running the touch switch in a mode where it causes an interrupt every time it's touched or released all of the functions for dealing with the touch switch are already in your Arduino IDE now in our application we're only going to be using one of the touch which is touch one on the very first pin so the only wiring for our project is to connect the wire to touch one and then connect it to a touch plate of sorts this can be as simple as a small piece of wire once you've got that hooked up we can take a look at the code for our voice recording camera now here's the sketch for our voice recording camera and you'll notice it's actually three files there's also the camera index and Camera pins file and these are just two standard esp32 cam files that you can copy over into the same directory that you have your code now we'll start off with the sketch uh by showing you which libraries it includes we include of course the Arduino and esp32 Camera Library the fs libraries for the file system SD library is for the micro SD card and SPI library is how we interface the micro M SD so all three of these are basically for the micr SD and then i2s is the i s library that we need for the microphone now we'll start by defining what kind of a camera that we have and this relates back to the camera pins uh file over here and of course we'll include that file as well then we'll set up the amount of record time in seconds I'm setting mine for 10 seconds if you want to adjust that if you think it's too long or maybe even Too Short you can don't go over 20 40 seconds which is a pretty long recording now some audio settings the sample rate the sample size one parameter here you might want to experiment with is this one here the volume gain I've got it set to three if the sound is too low you can try raising that I'd be very careful doing that though because eventually it'll just start to distort now we have a couple of status variables for both the camera and the SD they're booleans that we initialize as false we have a file counter and this is going to be used to create the name of our file we'll start it off with a value of one and this is the threshold for our touch switch now this should work okay for you but if it doesn't you can experiment with it but this value is pretty good for the esp32 and we have a Boolean as well that uh indicates if the touch switch has been detected and we'll set it as false now we'll go into a couple of functions which I'll just touch over here the first one is that we are going to save the pictures to an SD card so this is photo save and we pass it the file name of the photo that we're going to save now this function itself calls another function called Write file which you'll find below it and this writes to the micro SD card so just make sure everything is written correctly now below that we have record wav that records the wave file and we provided the string which is the file name and it puts a bunch of parameters into here and it starts recording the sound now when it goes to U Save the sound it needs to generate a header for the wave file so it calls something called generate wave header so if we go further down over here we'll see that we've generated wave header this is not my own work but you can see the reference for it over here and this gives you all the different Header information for a wave file so if you've ever been interested in that well this will break it down for you now this very small function here is the call back function when the touch switch is touched and as most callbacks it's a very simple function that uh doesn't do very much you want it to be quick and all we do is we set the value of this Boolean to true to say that the touch switch has indeed been detected now this last one that says camera parameters these are actually values to belong in the setup but it makes the setup very long so I just stuck them into their own function and nothing else so these are just a bunch of parameters that belong in setup and now we get to the actual setup so we'll start the serial Monitor and we'll wait for it to begin because we want to see the serial monitor because it's going to be getting the information about when we're taking pictures uh the iqu set s setup over here so we'll set this up for the microphone and then we attach the touch switch uh to its interrupt Handler and we Define the camera parameters uh you saw that earlier so we'll Define the camera parameters and initialize that's all that stuff that I copied up there cuz it was too much for the setup if the uh camera is good if we make it this far we'll set the status to True we'll say that the serial monitor the camera is okay and we'll go and initialize the micro SD card so we'll initialize the SD assuming it initializes correctly we'll go and grab the card type and uh the card type will be displayed over here onto the serial monitor so we'll not only acknowledge that we have a micro SD but we'll tell you what type of Micro SD and then we'll set the status to true for the SD card then we go into the loop where you can really understand and where everything works first of all we make certain of course that the camera and the SD card are okay then we see if the touch switch has been detected if it has been detected then we know we've been touched we need to take a picture we'll print that to the serial Monitor and we'll use this to create a file name now we're going to take the file count and concatenate it to the name image. jpig so it'll be image 1. JPEG for our first one image 2. JPEG for our second one Etc then we'll go and take a picture and pass it that file name and we'll save that picture then we go for the audio file we're going to say that we're going to record so many seconds of sound it'll be a default of 10 but you could have changed that we'll do the same thing to generate a name for our audio file and you'll notice we're calling it image that may be a little bit confusing but the reason I did that is that the only difference with this file is it's got an extension of wav cuz it's a wave file and if we name it the same as the picture file then when we list it in the directory the pictures and their Associated wave files will be next to each other so I kept it as image something. wve and then we'll record the audio save it increment that file counter for the next time down here we'll reset that touch variable so we're ready for it apply a short delay and go back into the loop so the loop actually pretty well shows you how everything works and it itself is fairly simple so let's take this sketch and load it up and see if we can get our camera with voice recording working all right well we're ready to test our camera slvo recorder with the touch switch activation now testing out a camera on the ceduo Sha is not that easy when you're trying to mount the camera the camera on the Sha is just uh mounted on its own cable so it kind of flops around there you could secure it to the micro SD card in the same way that you do with the ESP 32 cam however you'd have to Place quite a kink in the cable so I've just got it arranged on a little Mount here on my workbench and it's about 30 cm or a foot away from a Target over here and what I'm going to do is take a picture of the target announce that I'm taking a picture of the target background and then I've got a few things like this ceduo sha over here that I'll hold in front of the background and take pictures of it and I will narrate that as well and I decided that would be the test that we're going to do so uh I've not got the sh connected yet I've got to do that first so I plugged in the micro USB and you can see on the screen that it says the camera is okay and it tells me I've got an SDHC card so it identified the type of micro USB card I've got so now I'll just take a picture of the background and I'll press the touch switch here this is a picture of the background says it's recording my sound and the sound recording is finished so it's taken its first picture it's taken both a JPEG and a wave file so now I'll give it something to take a picture of so this is a ceduo Shia ESP 32 S3 board okay so it looks like we've got a recording there as well let's do another one this is a ceduo sha prototyping board and so now we've saved a third image and a third wave file and let's do a final one this is the back of a ceduo sha round display okay I've got my data so what I'm going to do is power down the Sha remove the micro SD card and read it on the computer and see what I've actually got all right well I've plugged the micro SD card into the computer and I've opened it up in the file manager and as you can see I've got four sets of jpig and wave files labeled image 1 through image 4 now you'll notice the date on these are set back to the Linux zero date and of course we never did set the file date inside our software and for one thing our file date is unavailable to us because we don't know what date it actually is that would require some more complex coding and a real time clock okay so I've got the four Images let's take a look at them and here's my first lovely image as you can see it's not that lovely but it's it's all right uh the next one little bit out of focus but we are indeed taking pictures with our camera and that's what we're set to prove Okay so we've looked at our images now the four wave files there's a number of different ways you can play wave files if you don't have a specific spefic audio application VLC media player will play back wave files uh you could of course use audacity that's pretty popular but one thing I'm going to use is another program you may not have heard of it's called ocean audio I've got it over here now this is available for Linux uh for Windows and Mac I'm using it under Linux right now it's a pretty neat little audio editor it's not as featured as audacity but it does most of the things you'd want it to do and it does have a neat feature that I didn't even know it had until I tried doing it with these wave files so let me show you I'm going to open up all the waves highlight them all and open with ocean audio and look at that there's a thumbnail beside each one of the wave files like here's my first one and it's got the thumbnail beside it that is the corresponding picture and of course that's because we've got the picture and the audio file named the same and you can see the different wave files I've got over here so I have indeed recorded the the wave now the way that I'm set up over here right now I am not set up to play this right now and have it come through the recording it has to do with some cabling over here which is a bit too complex to explain but what I will do right now is just play this wave file through the uh production when I make the video this is a picture of the background says it's recording my sound this is a ceduo Shia ESP 32 S3 board this is a ceduo sha prototyping board this is the back of a ceduo sha round display okay so it does look like our camera does indeed work now one little Caution I want to give you is when you're inserting or removing the micro SD card from the sh make sure that you press down on the top module it's really easy to pop that off of the bottom module but otherwise it makes her a neat little camera and with a bit of extra code and an enclosure it might even be a practical device now the sh esp32 S3 sense board comes with a 2 megapixel camera and it's the same 2 megapixel camera module that we used in the ESP 32 cam you can however upgrade the camera module to an ov5640 module which is a 5 megapixel module and of course will give you a better picture Seed Studio does sell this module in a little kit for the upgrade and I've got one of those kits so let's go and install the camera upgrade the camera that we'll be upgrading our sh to is the ov5640 camera module this is another omnivision product and it was released in 2009 it uses omn vision's patented 5 megap camera chip sensor this is a/4 in sensor with a 25 92x 1944 pixel array this camera is capable of HD video at 30 frames per second it has internal back lighting which improves its low light sensitivity the camera also has an internal voice coil motor and this provides an integrated autofocus functionality and so here's the ov5640 module from Seed Studio packaged in their standard packaging and we will open that up and retrieve the contents and so here are the contents the camera itself now this is the OV 5640 camera and you can see a little module on the end of a very long ribbon cable and that's about it for the camera it also comes with a package of heat sinks over here now it comes with a big heat sink and a small one the small one is sized to the back of the camera my understanding is that the big heat sink can also be used on the back of the camera because these modules get rather warm now there are no instructions given with this by the way but basically what you need to do is to get this camera module onto here and so it's actually not that difficult to do if you've never used one of these connectors before all you need is something like this small screwdriver here and you place it under here and here if you can see it pops up like a little door there you go The Little Door is popped up and you can just remove the old one and place the new one in make sure that you have the conductors facing down of course and fold it and there we go and we now have a camera module attached to our ceduo Chow unit and we can go and test that now at 5 megapixels the OV 5640 module is clearly an upgrade over the original 2 megapixel module it also has better low light performances and for those reasons alone it's probably worth the upgrade however one other feature that it has is one that I'm having a bit of problems understanding how to work and that is the autofocus feature now Seed Studio clearly advertises this as an autofocus capable camera they make mention of that several times in the ad including a paragraph that explains how autofocus is going to make your pictures clear but that's it they have no other information about the autofocus feature now there is a library out there the ov5640 library for esp32 that will allow you to use autofocus however I try it with this camera and I could not get it to work with the Shia esp32 S3 sense board I did change the pinouts to match the pinouts on this board but I still couldn't get the library to work and that just may be my inability to do it I'm not saying it won't work now I looked at the schematic for the board for the esp32 S3 cense card that has the camera on it and there are indeed connections that support the autofocus and that's basically you need to provide 3 Volts for the voice coil motor in order to work the autofocus and they do do that and so it is set up hardware-wise to use autofocus but I'm not sure it's working in software now there is a hack for this camera apparently that lets it internally do all of the autofocus operations but that hack still requires an external driver and I'm not sure if it's there I did post a question to Seed Studio but that was about a week ago and they have got back to me on it so as to whether the autofocus is working on this camera I don't know let's just hook it up and see if maybe we can find out for ourselves and here's the setup that I'm using to test our upgraded camera for our ceduo Shia now it's essentially the same setup I Ed to test the original camera once again I've got everything mounted on a bunch of magnetic Clips I've got the large heat sink on the back of the camera I found that this camera does indeed get quite warm and that the small heat sink really wasn't that adequate so I've put a large heat sink onto this now when it's streaming it gets warm enough to the point where I wouldn't really feel comfortable holding it in my hand it's not that it would burn me but it's actually very very hot uh I noticed that when the camera is attached to the board but we're running a program that doesn't use the camera there's still a little warmth from the camera but not very much but if you are mounting this thing you're going to have to take heat dissipation into account now now once again I'm focusing on my robot test Target and I've got um the camera web server program open now let's set the resolution over here to something a little larger let's maybe make it 800 by 600 and we'll go and we'll start our stream and if you look at our stream you might notice something's a little bit a miss here right now now take a look at the picture of what the camera should be seeing and what we're getting back and you can see this is a mirror image of it for some reason this camera gives a mirror image of course you can correct that in the camera web server by just doing horizontal mirror and there we are and it actually does make a very nice picture now I'm not sure about the autofocus I don't know if I bring something closer or further if it's going to focus on it I don't think it does it by itself the camera has autof Focus capabilities but you really need to be doing something in software it can give you the autofocus Focus signals and it can accept them but I don't think it can do it itself it does have a good depth of field though everything does seem to appear in Focus uh let's just give it a different Target and see if maybe we can check that out this is uh ey chart so to speak it's a standard chart for for looking at eyes for examining them I'll just bring it in a bit closer to the camera and we can see if it tries to focus the focus stays pretty good but I don't know if it's autofocus or again if it's just a good depth of field but at either rate it is a very good looking camera the colors are very sharp uh it seems to definitely pick up a bit more than the previous camera did so it is a good upgrade just keep in mind that heat dissipation issue and you shouldn't have any problems with it now I decided to try and give this a bit more of a distance test after all I was only testing at a maximum distance of about 40 cm so I put the camera on one end of my workshop on the end with my peg board and I stood myself on the other end with my focus Target my focus Target is what I use when I film myself in the workshop and as I moved back and forth I could see no autofocus action an interesting note in the video that the camera is seeing you can also see the video monitor that I'm watching the camera web server on and if you look really carefully right below it you can also see the screen on the video recorder but that aside it doesn't really seem to be autofocusing for me and I look forward to getting some more information from Seed Studio so that we can actually get the autofocus working now in conclusion I really did like the ceduo Shia esp32 S3 sense board although I wish they'd come up with a shorter name for it because having to say ceduo Shia sp32 S3 cents all the time was getting kind of monotonous maybe they could take a queue off of people like Arduino who name boards like Unos and Nanos but naming aside I thought it was a really nice little board it was a very high quality build and it is indeed an excellent value now we have to remember that you can also buy this esp32 S3 board as a separate board and when you do you'll find that it's about the most inexpensive way of getting into an esp32 S3 board so it's a great deal now I wish there' been a bit more documentation about the autofocus on the camera expansion and that camera expansion is something that I think you really need to look at carefully it does indeed give you a 5 megapixel camera but it runs very very hot when you're streaming video for photography applications though I think it would be excellent now if you want to get more information about the ceduo showboard that we looked at today you'll find that on the article in the Drone box workshop.com website and of course there is a link right below this video to that article when you're on the website please consider signing up for my newsletter it's not a salesletter something I stand out every now and then just to let you know what's going on here in the workshop and of course if you want to discuss this product the dronebot workshop forum is the best place to do that the Forum is free to sign up for and you'll be able to discuss this with a lot of like-minded individuals who can also help you out with your electronics projects and finally if you haven't please subscribe to the YouTube channel I make videos about electronics and I'm sure you'll enjoy them and all you need to do to subscribe is hit that little red subscribe button and also click on the Bell notification and assuming that you've enabled notifications you'll get notified every time I make a new video so until we meet the next time please take good care of yourself stay safe out there and I will see you again very soon here in the Drone box Workshop goodbye for [Music] now

Channel: DroneBot Workshop

Views: 46,222

Keywords: xiao esp32s3 sense, seeed studio, esp32 cam, esp32 tutorial, esp32 camera module, esp32 camera

Id: qNzlytUdB_Q

Length: 45min 27sec (2727 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023