About This Handbook This handbook covers 20 mainstream embedded camera modules — 8 OV/GC series (OV2640, OV5640, OV7725, GC0309, OV7670, OV3660, GC2053, GC4653) and 12 Sony IMX/OV MIPI series (IMX219, IMX273, IMX296, IMX307, IMX335, IMX415, IMX477, IMX678, IMX708, IMX766, plus OV9281 and OV5647). All parameters are sourced from official datasheets, with sources noted at the end of each section.
Quick Selection Guide Start with this table to find your use case, then read the details below.
Why I built a surveillance camera with ESP32-S3 before, and it worked well. Later, while rummaging through a drawer, I found an AI-Thinker ESP32-CAM development board — that classic board costing about ten bucks with a built-in OV2640 camera and TF card slot. No reason to let it go to waste, so I built another one: ai-thinker-esp32-cam.
This time I wrote the firmware from scratch using ESP-IDF again, with similar capabilities to the previous project but with lots of adaptations for the AI-Thinker board. Here’s what it ended up doing:
Why We have a few parrots at home, and during the workday nobody’s around. I wanted to check in on them anytime. The requirement sounds simple: real-time video streaming, recording to storage, and ideally automatic backup to NAS. Off-the-shelf cameras are either expensive or require installing apps, registering accounts, and binding phone numbers — privacy concerns. I just want to watch my birds, not stream video to someone else’s server.
Why I have several LANs in different locations around the city, roughly 10 km apart. To make these networks talk to each other, I used tools like NetBird, ZeroTier, and Cloudflare Tunnel to set up a cross-region virtual LAN.
The network was set up, but how to ensure stability? After all, these tunnels traverse the public internet with varying link quality. The most direct approach is to use Prometheus’s blackbox_exporter for probing — periodic HTTP requests, Pings, DNS queries — feeding results into a time-series database with alert rules, so problems are detected immediately.
Introduction This article records the process of building a temperature and humidity monitor with an ESP01 + DHT11, covering hardware wiring, code implementation, and functional verification. The ESP01, a low-cost, low-power WiFi module, is well suited as a collection node.
Hardware Preparation ESP01 Board: Core control module, responsible for data collection and network communication. DHT Temperature and Humidity Sensor: Used to measure ambient temperature and humidity. Dupont Wires: Used to connect the ESP01 and DHT sensor. Connect the DHT sensor’s VCC pin to the ESP01’s 3.3V pin, the GND pin to GND, and the data pin to the designated pin on the ESP01 (defined as DHTPIN in the code).