Firebeetle 2 ESP32 S3 Camera - don't consider buying!

Hi,

I have been struggling with Firebeetle 2 ESP32 S3 Camera for over 2 weeks now. My advice: forget it. Why?

 

1.

- there is still no Micropython firmware version for the board that supports the camera. The documentation points to a version w/o camera support.- but - luckily - there is a Cicruitpython firmware with espcamera library built in. But you have to search hard. 2.- I have never seen a board that shows such a low stability on the USB/serial port. The connection to Thonny works one time perfectly and 10 minutes later not at all, even not after a row of resets, but suddenly, it is OK again. The reason may not be the board itself but the Circuitpython, however: it drives you crazy!!

 

3.

- but here is the worth: the camera always gives you noisy pictures with stripes, see this forum's article: “Noisy image on firebeetle 2 esp32-s3”.  You can also ask google for “esp32 cam stripes”. There is no setting to get rid of this. I also changed the camera module and cleaned the connector (as advised), changed power supply, added more capacitors (220uF) to the power supply of the board and/or the camera: to no avail! Even if you look at this forum's article “Noisy image on firebeetle 2 esp32-s3”, the developpers have no 100% solution on that, other than playing on the parameters to get the stripes somehow less visible. It seems it is a fundamental board design error that either doesn't provide enough stability of the cam's power supply or has a bad layout, sensible to every kind of interference.

 

Bottomline: invested 20bugs in the board, 10bugs for exchanging the camera module to a new one, and - worst thing -  numerous evenings of trial and error → pos

 

Cheers!