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Project guidance: Real time camera stream over local network

JanTho23

New Member
Hello Everyone,
Thank you in advance for reading this, I generally exhaust every resource I can find before consulting others specifically with my problems and I wouldn't make a post if I wasn't seriously stuck.
I am quite deep in a project where I am now trying to add a stable (preferably 20 fps with SVGA or similar) real time camera stream over a local network (distance of client and host are only about 5 meters in normal use case) to my system. The device controlling the camera feed should also be connected to communicate with an ESP32 chip which controls the main system of sensors.
Currently I have realised the camera feed with an ESP-32 cam module hosting a http webserver which is streaming the camera input in the MJPEG format. For the end device to view the camera stream and host the GUI I am using a mobile phone running on Android which I wrote an app for that can display that MJPEG stream and make http requests to the ESP32 cam module server which then communicates with the ESP32 chip to control the system (which I don't think is the best solution but I don't really have an idea how to do it differently since camera streaming is costly).
This way it works but the ESP32 cam module is quite instable at times, the quality could be better and due to hardware issues with the OV camera sensor (which I couldn't find a fix for yet) it gets hot quite fast which I really don't want. Now I am looking for alternatives like doing it with a RPI but I find the resources on this quite slim plus RPI seems to have latency issues with real time camera feeds in most sources that I found. I am really curious how industry professionals would go about this project.
So now I need general guidance if what and how I am doing it is somewhat in line with how professionals do it (really any advice is helpful) and how I can improve my system. And then also I would love to hear ideas on how to get a decent real time camera stream to work since this is the part of my project that is bugging me the most while everything else is generally working pretty well.
Again thank you very much for reading, I am greatful for every help I can get on this.
 
The OV2640 camera sensor on ESP32-CAM is prone to overheating. It has a limited frame rate and resolution.If you switch to Raspberry Pi, you can achieve: Higher-quality camera streams with better frame rates (up to 30 fps at 1080p). You'll get lower latency by configuring RTSP or HLS (HTTP Live Streaming). And a better thermal management. Raspberry Pi is designed to handle more intensive processing tasks than the ESP32-CAM.
 
A cheap IP security camera would cost less than a Raspberry Pi, and as long as you get one that supports the ONVIF format there are phone apps to view them directly, in full quality.

There are also open source projects for viewing onvif compatible cameras, eg.
 
First off, thank you for the replies,
It seems that the ESP32-CAM module probably isn't the right fit for this project then so I will look closer into doing it with an RPI. I will look into RTSP and HLS as latency seems to be the main issue I have with most RPI camera projects I have found so thanks for that.
The idea with a cheap IP camera also seems worth a shot, as long as it is small enough. My problem with that then is the end user device has to be in the same network as the IP camera to view the stream which means I can't also communicate with the ESP32 main system at the same time while watching the stream. Currently I have that solved by letting the ESP32-CAM forward all the information and commands to the main system (via a serial connection) so this way I can do both things at the same time. There might be an obvious solution to this should I use an IP cam (if I were to use an RPI a serial connection should do fine) but I am not seeing it right now. If anyone has good ideas for this,vany suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks very much in advance.
 

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