Tonight I finally got around to firing up the ESP32-CAM I’ve had sitting in a drawer for long enough to forget exactly where it came from or what it came with.
It’s an annoying little buttmunch of an ESP32, because it didn’t come with a USB programming port. This means you have to wire up a USB-TTL FTDI programmer, ground IO0, and hit the reset button to program it.
I used the Arduino-provided example. Once you install the ESP32 boards via Boards Manager, it becomes available under ESP32->Camera->CameraServer.
All you really need to do is specify the board, fill in your SSID and Wifi password, and upload the sketch. It took a few tries, but it finally came up. Once it came up, I could see on the serial monitor that it had received an IP address. I browsed to it and was surprised to see the many options available in the example software. Face recognition is in there if you drop the resolution low enough.
In such a tiny, low-cost, low-power package, I could easily see building very cheap hidden cameras out of these and integrating them into your security/surveillance package. In fact, there are dozens of housings available on Thingiverse.
Here’s an example of someone who took the ESP32-CAM to the next level:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4315841