ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu May 28, 2015 3:38 pm #18775 I've wondered if anyone has been able to hook up a camera to a ESP8266 and host video or a refreshing page of photos.
I've done a bit of googling but haven't seen any projects like that yet.. maybe the ESP doesn't have the power?
or maybe a camera module doesn't exist? I've seen the ESP can do I2C, and there are some I2C cameras out there..

I'd really like to do it stand alone.. without the need for an Arduino or something.. but if needed that's fine.
I just thought I'd ask before trying to reinvent the wheel..

I've looked into these small USB Spy camera things on Ebay.. and thought you could hook up a couple GPIO to the buttons for control, and Maybe read the image from the SD card or USB interface... But not sure.

Thanks for the advice,
Chris

- Thu May 28, 2015 9:34 pm #18795 I believe the processing power of ESP8266 is not enough for such things. You will either have to send raw data (too much traffic) or do slow compression (too much CPU usage).
In any case, the frame rate would be very low. More like sending static images.
I2C cameras are slow due to low speed of I2C interface.

If you need it this for something real, I would research other things. Maybe a working camera in the form factor as you need, or something based on OpenWRT if you need to be able to hack.
RaspberryPi + camera module can open a lot of opportunity for you if you need to do customizations for something specific.

- Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:31 am #20828 You may be totally correct.
However, in the interest of keeping this idea alive for a while I am going to dabble with this chip and video for a while.
Still putting my chip on a breadboard to let you all know where I am right now. But if there is other interest in this topic by others Please reply here in this forum. I will add my notes as I create them.
Just being hard headed since I have this cheap USB camera sitting here not doing anything.

Anyone who has any suggestions, ideas, all would be welcome.
Thanks