I dug out this project recently, trying to see if I can get it working with the new esp32_camera module in CircuitPython. I managed to get the board to either just crash and hang, or crash into safe mode, but not to capture any images. Then I went looking at the source code, and noticed a mention that it uses edma mode when the master clock is set to 16MHz. So I changed it from the default of 20MHz, and lo and behold, I got some data coming in both the GREYSCALE and and RGB565 modes. The JPEG mode is still returning no frames, though, though it no longer crashes.

So I thought: maybe I have the data pins in wrong order somehow, and that is why the JPEG mode doesn't work – because there is a certain header expected by the code, and if the pins are in the wrong order, it never gets the right data. But how do I verify that? Maybe I could at least display the data I'm getting in the RGB565 mode to see if it's correct, and then if it's not, I would at least know the problem lies there and I could try changing the pin order or something.

So I connected the display to the board with the camera shield, and added all the code that initializes it, and... nothing. White screen.

Which is very strange, because this is CircuitPython, and so after the code finishes running it should display the REPL, not a white screen. So I started commenting out pieces of code, and it turns out I get white screen as soon as I create the camera object... And then it won't go away until a hard reset. Just great.

In the mean time I realized that even if I get this shield working, it will not work with the #Fluffbug robot, which was the main reason I was working on it in the first place. Why not? Because the esp32-s2 can only do up to 8 PWM channels, and I'm already using all of them for controlling the servos of the robot. And the camera driver uses at least one PWM channel to generate the master clock.

So now I'm thinking about giving up on the esp32-s2 all together, and using the imagecapture library with rp2040 instead. I will be doing some further experiments to see if that works any better. At least it doesn't have to deal with the horrible Espressif code.