Seeking a ESP32 Camera Module recommendation that others have found stable, quality, etc.?

[Jibun-no-Kage]

Seeking a ESP32 Camera Module recommendation that others have found stable, quality, etc.? But with 10s of variants of these ESP32 Camera modules which one? Leaning towards those that have dual USB type-c, just because I could see a future potential to writing out snapshot to usb drive maybe. But this is not a hard requirement.

Project is, I need to setup a ESP32 based camera that will 'watch' a TV. This is not A.I. or any type of recognition required. At minimum, ESP32 module is just taking a snapshot every few seconds of what the camera sees, and then sending that snapshot to a 'listening' application, that will show the snapshot in a small window on a PC or Mac. If the ESP32 module could have some basic recognition, such as the TV is on or off based on some image or no image on the screen that would be nice to have.

I have built may ESP8266 and ESP32 projects, including a wireless 'tally' light control system for boom/jib cameras where the operator could not see the actual camera tally, so familiar MQTT use in MP, custom wiring of projects, even used 'espNow' protocol for ESP to ESP communication. But given I have a scenario where I need ESP32 to talk to a PC or Mac thinking MQTT would easier, comes down to how much data I have to send for the snapshot I guess, over wifi.

So you have a ESP32 Camera module you have used, and like, please suggest. And if you done a project like this in some way, tell me how you did it?

[Jibun-no-Kage]

This is comparable to what I want to achieve, maybe with a bit of post processing on the back end to analyze the image returned, as a dynamic ismage, i.e. video or changing slides on screen, versus a black screen, i.e. TV off, or a static screen, i.e. content on TV appears to be frozen.

https://realtimelogic.com/articles/Streaming-ESP32CAM-Images-to-Multiple-Browsers-via-MQTT

[scruss]

LILYGO tend to make decent ones. They're more expensive than the usual AliExpress crowd, but are typically well finished. The main problem is matching the ESP32 module and camera (some use the 5 Mpx OV5640, with autofocus even) to the available firmwares. Unless you wish to build your own custom firmware, you might have to put up with a slightly older MicroPython version. I've used the T-SIMCAM, but not with MicroPython.

I might suggest that the best MicroPython camera isn't an ESP32 at all, but something from OpenMV. These aren't cheap, but they're designed for machine vision applications. They have lots of camera options, and their API supports object detection. You can run their code on the WeAct Studio clone boards, but those are a couple of hardware revisions behind what OpenMV are shipping.

[Jibun-no-Kage]

@scruss Thanks for the insight. I am going to stick to the ESP32 based concept for now. But I did look at the OpenMV solution. I may end up using the OpenMV solution depending on the test results I get with the ESP32 side of things. I also could just use a small web cam with Pi (or other SBC) of course. I also found a ESP32 CAM module with integrated Ethernet/POE, going to try that as well.