Arducam as a live web cam

I recently managed to Send images from Arducam to Azure, which was a major win. Only challenge with that is it isn’t easy to see those images inside Azure. Thus, I wanted an easy way to do this and figured that displaying on a web page was the go.

Turns out, this isn’t to hard using Azure. Thus, I started by modifying the code for the controller so it would always upload an image using the same name and do so every 60 seconds. You can find the code for the controller here:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Arducam/3MP/storage-web.cpp

and documentation here:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Arducam/3MP/storage-web.md

Next, I created an index.html file to display the image from Azure Blob storage. You can find a copy of that here:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Arducam/3MP/web-index.html

you need to rename it to index.html and put the name of your Blob storage URL on line 40.

Next, you’ll need to enable a static website on your Blob storage account.

Go to Azure Portal (portal.azure.com)
Navigate to your storage account: arducamimages
In the left menu, find “Static website” (under “Data management” or “Settings”)
Click “Enabled”
Set Index document name: index.html
Note the Primary endpoint URL (e.g., https://arducamimages.z8.web.core.windows.net/)
Click “Save”

Then you’ll need to upload your index.html to the $web container in your Blob storage account.

In your storage account, click “Containers” (under “Data storage”)
Click on the $web container (created automatically when you enabled static website)
Click “Upload”
Select your index.html file
Check “Overwrite if files already exist”
Click “Upload”

Now you’ll need to set public access for $web container.

While in the $web container, click “Change access level”
Set “Public access level” to “Blob (anonymous read access for blobs only)”
Click “OK”

Next, set public access for images container

Go back to “Containers”
Click on the “images” container (where your latest.jpg is stored)
Click “Change access level”
Set “Public access level” to “Blob (anonymous read access for blobs only)”
Click “OK”

You should be able to view the website using the Primary endpoint, that was back in the Static website settings as shown above. In my case I also need to add /index.html to end of the URL to get it to display.

You can see my result above. The page should refresh every 60 seconds automatically with a new image. You should also be able to now view this image from anywhere by simply browsing to your URL.

My next plan is to try and integrate Azure AI vision, given the image is already now in Azure, and for the page to report the weather i.e. sunny, wet, etc. yes, I know you can see that in the image but that makes it an easy way to very that Ai reading the image correctly. Let’s see how hard that is to do next.

Arducam Mega 3MP failed attempt

I returned to my quest of getting the Arducam Mega 3MP working anf have had no luck at all. I have created the following diagnosis program that might help someone else here:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Arducam/3MP/diag.cpp

My latest attempt was with an Arduino R4 WiFi and all I keep getting is connection failures and incorrect reads. I have tried various wiring changes and testing but still no luck at all.

mega

I used the above wiring but to no avail. The code uses pin 10 for CS, which also doesn’t seem to work.

The result indicate it is detected by any reads and writes come back wrong. I have tried all sorts of timing changes to no avail. Thus, I’m going to shelve this for a while and move on with other things.

It really shouldn’t be this hard and I can only think that perhaps the camera has somehow been damaged in all my testing. Perhaps a new one and fresh start is in order?

Configuring an Arducam Mega 3MP

The next step in my plans was to add vision to my environment. For this I selected the Arducam Mega 3MP camera, which seemed to be straight forward enough from the initial research that I did. That has turned out to be significantly wrong.

I started off with trying to connect the camera to the ESP32 S2 Wroom but that was an abject failure. I then decided to move back to the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 to eliminate challenges with the ESP-32 S2 Wroom. Even this has proved challenging. Here’s what I have achieved so far.

The first challenge is to understand the SPI interface, which I haven’t dealt with before. You can read more about the SPI interface here:

https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/communication/spi/

and here:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/serial-peripheral-interface-spi/all

but according to the docs:

Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a synchronous serial data protocol used by microcontrollers for communicating with one or more peripheral devices quickly over short distances.

In essence, I needed to correct connect the Arducam Mega 3MP camera SPI interface to the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 SPI interface. The Arducam Mega 3MP camera pinouts look like:

and this is how I connected it to the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266

1. CS (Chip Select) -> GPIO16 (or any available GPIO pin) (D4)

2. MOSI -> GPIO13 (D7)

3. MISO -> GPIO12 (D6)

4. SCK -> GPIO14 (D5)

5. GND -> GND

6. 3.3V –> 3V

VCC (3.3V) and GND for the camera I have taken from an external power supply source.

With all that now wired up, the other trick is that you need to have something to receive and display the image from the camera. All the demos I saw pointed to a Arducam GUI tool:

https://www.arducam.com/docs/arducam-mega/arducam-mega-getting-started/packs/GuiTool.html

or direct download:

https://github.com/ArduCAM/Arducam_Mega/releases/download/v2.0.1/ArducamMegaSetup_Windows_x64.exe

which you install on your PC and view the camera via the USB cable

However, I had no real luck getting this to work at all with the example code provided. Therefore I returned to first principles.

I used this code:

https://github.com/directorcia/ciaopslabs/blob/main/Projects/15/ov3640-capture.cpp

to capture an image which seemed to work without any issues when I looked at the terminal messages and execution. Problem was, I could now capture an image but I couldn’t see it! I needed to send the image somewhere to view it. Rather than use the Windows app I thought I’d send it to an adafruit.io dashboard.

Once I had set up a dedicated feed in adafruit.io and a dashboard with an image widget I used this code:

https://github.com/directorcia/ciaopslabs/blob/main/Projects/15/ov3640-upload-v1.cpp

to try and send it. Unfortunately, I could see the code was executing and uploading to adafruit.io but I was getting feed errors. Some data had indeed appeared in the feed but an image wasn’t displaying. I also found that the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 was getting some sort of major error causing it to reset regularly.

After some investigation, it was recommended to disable the history on an adafruit.io feed to allow for greater data transfer sizes. The documentation tells me:

While history is turned ON, feed data is limited to 1KB (1024 bytes) in size.

While history is turned OFF, feed data is limited to 100KB (102400 bytes) in size

To do this go into the adafruit.io Feed and select the COG next to the Feed History heading as shown above. In the dialog that appears set the history to OFF as shown.

The other thing that I noted was:

The uploaded images appear to need to be base64 encoded.

I have some new code to try and overcome all of these issues which I’ll now go and try.

Controller upgrade

I’ve decided to upgrade the remote controller for the robot. Adafuit.io has the above component you can add to your dashboard. This provides a lot more commands than the original

one that I have been using as can be seen above.

My plan now is to add a pan and tilt camera to the robot so it can ‘see’. I’m also working on creating some additional parts for the robot to hold the 6V batter case as well as make the front platform more accessible. I’ll basically place it above the 6V battery which will sit over the front wheels.

I am also working on a way to better secure the bread board onto the robot rather than using a bulldog clip. It is all getting rather crowded up there, so creating some more space will be good.

It seems like the camera interfaces to the ESP32S2 Wroom using a set of SPI connectors which are:

which I found here:

https://docs.arducam.com/Arduino-SPI-camera/MEGA-SPI/MEGA-Quick-Start-Guide/

most of which I can see on the board:

The one that is missing is CS = 7. I found this after some hunting:

pin 7 on the ESP32-S2 Thing Plus WROOM is the IO4 pin

I am not sure whether it os true but I’ll try:

GPIO04 on the other side of the chip as shown above as the pin for CS.

I bought this camera:

https://core-electronics.com.au/arducam-mega-3mp-camera.html

AC-B0400-5

which has pinouts:

Once I get it all connected then I need to write to code to capture images. There are lots of examples of doing that with an app on your desktop but I want the camera to capture an image and send it up to adafuit.io which it seems I can do. No sure of exactly how just yet, but first step is getting the camera hooked up and being able to view the images it captures.