AiTrip 3 Pack ESP32-CAM WiFi + Bluetooth Module Development Board with OV2640 Camera Module

This ESP32 Cam draws more power than others I have used but other than that it works as well the others.The orientation of the camera is 90° different from my other units which requires a design change to my holder. If what I have read online is correct the camera comes in two versions so it's kind of the luck of the draw as to which orientation you will get.

I really like this board. It is capable and inexpensive. It works OK and seems to have a lot of potential uses. There are some big caveats:- It''s fussy about its power supply. It needs more peak current than you might think. Use the 5V pin for power.- No instructions are included. Be prepared to do some research- There are no mounting holes. There's no good way to hold the board.- The camera ribbon is delicate and not robust.- The reset button is on the underside. Reset is not available at a pin.- There's no USB port. A FTDI serial converter board is necessary. Loose wire connections are used.- Supporting software has to be downloaded from multiple locations. It might not be Windows-friendly.

Compared to other esp32-cam boards I've used, the performance when using wifi to access the camera feed is very poor. I can get 1-3 FPS with a simple jpeg http server on others and this one is very slow to refresh the jpeg feed. It only gets about 1 frame every 3-5 seconds. There's also audible noise that appears to coincide with WiFi transmit/receive. That's likely caused by buck converters or some other power circuitry being faulty or low quality. I bought a 6-pack and they are all showing the same performance and audible noise.Still functional but fairly low quality.

These work fine when programmer from the Arduino IDE using the "AI Thinker ESP32-CAM" board option. All three units worked fine out of the box.Documentation could be better (available?) and as mentioned by others; the manufacturing quality is poor. Not knocking any stars here given the fair price.Some issues/notes I ran across along the way:1. Be prepared to do a little research to get these working- a great place to start are Amazon reviews!2. After programming with an FTDI (3.3v) the unit resets and immediately detects a brownout condition. Simply powering from another source or (with credit to another reviewer here) you can switch over your FTDI to 5.0v (with jumper removed) to get up and running with serial output.3. IF the camera is not detected, this can be an indication that not enough power is available or the camera was not secured properly.4. These can run hot when streaming jpegs- running off a 5V power supply, this was drawing ~.5A using the provided example.5. Be sure to connect to a 2.4Ghz wifi network

Out of the Box they were pre-programmed. Log on to camera Wi-Fi and enter 192.168.4.1 ... still have not been able to reprogram this esp32 unlike the very similar ESP 32 with backer board.