CS50X simple ES32 camera streaming app

CS50x is a popular and exciting online course provided by Harvard University (not for the faint-hearted, though!). I enrolled to one in September 2020. In the final few weeks of the course, students are expected to pick between 3 tracks: web, app, or game development. I choose App development cause I want to try something new and challenging. Also, I thought it would be cool to integrate an app into any of my personal projects in the future if needed (It didn’t take long for me to realize the amount of work that is required).

Project overview

The final requirement to complete this track is to create an app, and you are free to choose to make any app you wish. During that period, I was fiddling around with ESP32 and I thought of integrating it into my android smartphone.

ESP32-Cam

App main page

⏯︎ Click here for the final youtube presentation on the app!

Functionalities

• Able to live Livestream video
• Able to Capture pictures and save them to the phone

• An image capture of my bedroom taken from the ESP32 camera (spooky 90’s video quality)

Technical notes

• There is actually a web server running on the ESP32 (demo)
• The phone app is showing the embed tag website of the camera stream
• The ESP32 firmware is made using platformIO combined with the official ESP32 toolchain
• The ESP32 heats up excessively after a few minutes and causes a massive drop in camera stream quality (it becomes glitchy-like).
• Might be a heat issue or something else because the ESP32 does indeed consume a lot of power in general.

Afterthoughts

This ended up being a very challenging final project. There is minimal hand-holding in CS50x app development track - the java syntax is only briefly covered, and many students switch track halfway due to this, but the crazy person in me decided to press on. Setting up the ESP32 using the espressif toolchain ended up being quite a challenge, too, luckily there is a demo code that I managed to get it up and running. Only a bit of adjustment is needed in the demo code to get everything up. After touching this project, it is safe to say that I wouldn’t want to integrate app development it into my projects as it is a lot of work! So MIT app inventor might be more useful.