Truly Versatile ESP8266 WiFi Webcam Platform

[Johan Kanflo] built a sweet little ESP8266-based wireless camera. It’s a beautiful little setup, and that it’s all open and comes with working demo code is gravy on the cake! Or icing on the potatoes. Or something.

[Johan]’s setup pairs an ESP8266-12 module with an Arducam, which looks like essentially an SPI breakout board for the ubiquitous small CMOS image sensors. The board naturally has a power supply and headers for programming the ESP module as well as connectors galore. Flash in some camera code, and you’ve got a custom WiFi webcam. Pretty slick.

pogo_pin_animBut since [Johan] designed the ESP-8266 board with standard female headers connecting to the ESP, it could also be used as a general-purpose ESP dev board. [Johan] built a few daughterboards to go along with it, including a bed-of-nails ESP8266 tester (since you can never tell when you’re going to get a dud ESP unit) and WiFi-to-RFM69 radio bridge. That’s two awesome applications for a tidy little system, and a reminder to design for extensibility when you’re laying out your own projects.

We’ve previously covered [Johan]’s Skygrazer project, which tracks planes as they fly overhead and displays them on a gutted old Mac. Is it any surprise, then, that he’s also created an ADS-B-controlled moodlight? This guy is on fire!

33 thoughts on “Truly Versatile ESP8266 WiFi Webcam Platform

      1. If you want to use an animated GIF, only animate the section that provides information. Do not move what does not need to be moved, and if it does not actually need to be animated DON’T ANIMATE IT! I would guess that the primary complaint that everyone has about that GIF is that the second frame rotates the _entire_ image.

  1. In terms of using it as a dev board, there are a few things that could be added;
    – auto-reset and DTR circuit
    – +/- serial to usb
    – Vin pass-through
    – SPI pin out

    I’ve tried fitting such things in myself but am limited by single-sided fabrication technique (and having the SDA and SCL as well as Reset/GPIO16 on opposite sides of the modules make life sucky (also trying to avoid the contact areas where the on-module flash is broken out)

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