ESP32Cam

Those little ESP32-CAM modules with a 2 megapixel image sensor attached are pretty cheap, and will happily send pictures (not great pictures, it’s a fifteen year old device) to any competent web browser.

There’s the problem. It uses some clever scripting. So you don’t get anywhere with NetSurf, and I suspect that using Iris might be a little overkill.

So enter ESP32Cam, something I “threw together” over the past two days.

There’s a helpfile, but basically:

• Click on the iconbar icon. It’ll ask for the camera’s IP address or name. If you don’t know the address, try espressif.home or run the scanner (there’s a button for that).

• Once it is set up, clicking on the iconbar icon will open the viewer and toolbar, as shown above, only you’ll have different scenery. ;-)

• I wrote a blog article about the different options. For you, the important one is the Capture button. I’d also recommend you turn on “AEC DSP”. Oh, and select an image size that’s larger than a postage stamp.

• Once you have the camera set up, you don’t actually need the toolbar. You can fetch a new image by clicking SELECT anywhere in the viewer window.
  Clicking ADJUST will save that image to the root directory as _capture### where ### is a number that counts up (including over the application being quit and restarted).

That’s about it. Now I can control the camera and take snapshots directly from RISC OS with an application that runs in a half megabyte (and most of that is an image buffer).

https://heyrick.eu/blog/files/esp32cam01.zip (45K)

Oooh, new series of Love, Death, and Robots. *BYE

Update:

https://heyrick.eu/blog/files/esp32cam02.zip (48K)

• Now detects corrupt images (if image overflows camera’s 384,000 byte buffer);
  also copes with images that have junk at the end.
• Fixed bug with ISO exposure option.
• Frame size menu now goes from largest to smallest (to match the browser UI).
• Frame size names now have the pixel size in brackets. It looks better, but has made the toolbar slightly wider.
• “Raw GMA” is now called “Gamma correction”, as that’s what it means.
• Option to switch to a smaller toolbar.

Right then. Now to grab a Twix and crank up the mower… again…

WOW!!! Exactly what I was looking for!!

How do I get files onto Riscos if I do not have an internet connection? I have a uSD card running RiscOS on a RPi Zero W.
I have a ubuntu laptop and a win7 laptop and can see the uSD card in Ubuntu and it appears to have a small FAT 32 partition on it.

I think the best way for you would be:

1. download the zip file using your ubuntu laptop
2. copy the zip file onto the micro SD card boot partition that you can see
3. insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi and boot up RISC OS 5
4. Once you have reached the desktop, click on the disc drive icon to bring up !Boot folder
5. Double-click on the !Boot with the shift button pressed – this will open the directory to show the contents
6. Double-click the BootLoader file – This will open a window showing the Boot partition
7. You should see the zip file you copied across in step 2
8. Copy the zip file across into the root folder where the !Boot App is stored
9. Close all Windows except the root window where the !Boot folder
10. Run SparkFs or similar zip/archive apps available
11. Drag the file to the SparkFS icon on the Iconbar to open a window that will allow you to extract the files where you want them to go

Hopefully that helps you out – I hope the tool does what you want.