esp32-cam-ai-thinker as a camera module for openpnp

[Vyacheslav Kononenko]

Hello folks,

I am planning to make PNP machine for hobby project and want to use esp32-cam-ai-thinker as a camera module. Benefits I see of using them:

1 Very inexpensive for 2M pixels camera.

2 Compact size.

3 Can be attached to ethernet shield and get power delivered by the same ethernet cable it would send images.

4 Can control LED like WS2812B directly.

So it would be nice, compact self contained unit controllable from network (turn leds on/off, start/stop capture etc). I tried to look around and seems nobody created such unit before, but I could be wrong. If it was already made please point me there.

 Looking around I found that issue could be to deliver images to host PC as current drivers for openpnp are limited what it can receive. Am I correct?

So I created a project to evalute how it could deliver images over wired ethernet. I use ENC28J60 10BaseT ethernet module. So first try was to use UIPEthernet library which works after some twiks, but speed is very very slow. It took around 300ms for each SVGA frame (around 20000 bytes). So I wrote simplified version (no proper IP stack, just basic ARP handling and UDP), now I can deliver SVGA frame per 20ms, and XGA frame which is around 50KB 1024x768 in 45ms which is 22fps, and I think should be plenty.

But before I continue to invest some more time to it I want to ask here, if I am doing something wrong, or not considering something, or just for good advice.

Thanks,

Slava

PS I tried to connect to discord server to ask but it rejects :(