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Comment by mkoryak | Hacker News Reader

I tried to setup esp32-cam as a cheap security cam for my yard, but had a bad experience:

- There are no good tutorials on how to have the cam save to SD.

- streaming it is easy with esphome, but there is no easy way to save it since it doesn't use a normal streaming protocol

- the camera image quality sucks. I got some 5mp cameras to use instead of stock camera, but the chip can't stream that resolution at anything above 2-3fps

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The ESP32 is not really meant to be used with a camera. It has no hardware acceleration for the task, only ~500 KB of RAM (it can use external SPI PSRAM but not without massive performance penalties) and its radio is inadequate for high-bandwidth streaming. All those camera boards are basically a hack, they leverage the chip's parallel bus interface to receive data from a camera module with a built-in MJPEG encoder which does the heavy lifting; the data is then piped out as fast as the networking stack and radio can handle (i.e. not particularly fast).

A proper SoC with a dedicated camera interface and an external WiFi chip is going to do a far better job than pretty much any of these microcontrollers; even the low-end Allwinner V3 often used in cheap Chinese IP cameras can run circles around the ESP32, even with the overhead of a full Linux kernel. Microcontrollers with hardware camera acceleration (including a soon-to-be-released ESP32 variant) are slowly becoming more common, but the original ESP32 isn't one of them.

Thanks for the reply, I did not know this, and given that esp-cam is a thing, I thought it was not going to suck.

The allwinner socs aren’t nearly as plentiful as they were, prices on ali are significantly higher than a year or two ago.

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