Status Update: Since I bought another stock camera that matches my needs I no longer actively develop this project.
This firmware turns a ESP32-CAM module into a low power time-lapse camera. Taking pictures at a set interval, and storing them to SD card. In between captures the device will go into deep sleep mode to save battery power.
Use the Arduino IDE with ESP32 support to compile the firmware.
The config.h file offers some compile time customizations.
Before compiling the html_content.cpp file needs to be generated. Do this by executing the gen_html_content.sh script.
The tzinfo.json file can be updated with the tool from https://github.com/pgurenko/tzinfo. But this is normally not necessary.
Every time the device boots a new directory is created on the SD card. The directory name is created following the template 'timelapseXXXX', where 'XXXX' is replaced by a free sequence number. Pictures are stored to this directory.
The picture filenames contain the date and time of taking the pictures. If the time is not set, the clock will start at UNIX epoch, i.e. 01-01-1970 00:00:00.
When the camera is powered up it will go into set-up mode. In this mode the camera has an open Wi-Fi access point and a web server. Connect to the access point and go to http://camera.local to configure the camera and enable it.
Upon opening the set-up mode web site the camera's clock is automatically synchronized to the browsers clock.
In set-up mode the LED will blink at a 1 second interval.
To configure the software create a file named camera.cfg in the root directory of the SD card. The configuration file is text based containing one configuration option per line. Configuration options have the format 'key=value'. Spaces are striped from the front and back of both the key and value. Lines starting with a '#' and empty lines are ignored.
For a full list of available configuration options, see the camera.cfg example configuration.
The firmware puts the device in deep sleep if the interval between images is big. However the camera is not powered down. This is because the pin required to properly power down the camera is not connected to the MCU by default on the ESP32-CAM board. While the CAM_PWR pin that is available only switches of the 1.2 and 2.8 Volt voltage regulators. This only partially powers down the camera and leaves it in some undefined state. This is probably not according to spec
To properly power down the camera a modification must be made to the PCB. For details see doc/power_consumption.md.
If the red LED is flashing two short pulses every 2 seconds, this means an fatal software error occurred.
The only way to troubleshoot issues is to connect to the serial port and check the logging.
The serial port uses the following settings: 115200 Baud, 8N1.
The following things are important to know about the ESP32-CAM board hardware:
- The OV3640(/OV3660?) camera is NOT supported by the ESP32-CAM board. Because the camera uses a different core voltage, 1.5 V instead of 1.2 V. And the maximum Vdd I/O is only 3.0 V, instead of 3.3 V.
- Other cameras then the OV2640 are unlikely to work. Because the driver uses the old parallel DVP bus to communicate to the camera. Most newer cameras use the serial MIPI bus instead.
- GPIO12/HS_DATA2 pin is free for use in 1-bit SD-card bus mode. However, this pin is used by the ESP-32s module as strapping pin to configure the VDD_SDIO voltage, and thus must be low or floating at boot. See: https://wiki.ai-thinker.com/esp32/spec/esp32s