Security Cameras - ESP32-CAM

For a while I’ve wanted Security Camera’s, but I’ve been burnt out by more than a decades worth of the utter crap that is on the market. Now there are some really nice ones on the market, but they all rather expensive and a bunch tie into cloud services.

These just popped up on my radar:

I’ve bought a couple and it looks like it’s pretty exciting times for low cost hackable security cameras!

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I was looking at those. I bought a M5Camera which is an ESP32 cam in an enclosure, and wanted to see what the guts were to see how much they added to it from the board in the picture. I ended up stabbing a couple of the micro-tiny resistors (I think they were resistors) off the board right at the edge because I got a little overzealous with the prying tool. Wrecked it before I could even power it up. Oops. Will be curious to see how you like them. I still plan to buy one or 2 to play with but after trashing one, I think I need to throttle down on that idea for a bit :blush:

Oh neat, that looks pretty similar. But twice the price, though I’m tipping the USB-C has a lot to do with that.

If you figure out the resistances, you can probably replace them.

The M5 is basically the espcam module with USB C and a case that oddly enough, uses Lego components for the legs. I bought it for the form factor but the price is a bit steep for what it is. I cant fix it since I figured it was F’d already so I dissected it for fun. I had peeled the traces off the board where I scraped the resistors off and really didn’t want to try and repair it due to where the traces were damaged. Wasnt feasible.

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