The Eye of the Home

The Parts
Build
Dock
Home Assistant Integration

We’ve got a small-but-worthy project on our hands.

We’re going to build a home camera for less than 10$ and integrate it with HomeAssistant.

The Parts

The first part we need is the brain. The ESP32-CAM board can be bought separately and interfaced with through the pins. But its evolution, the ESP-CAM-MB, includes an additional board which provides us with a micro-USB interface. The linked version provides you with a VGA resolution, but you can order other lenses.

Homeasisstant Lovelace Card

We also need 2 IKEA Coasters, which I’ve also used in the lamp project. Any old Micro-USB cable will do as a connection to the power source.

Build

Carve a small hole, a bit larger than the camera lens. Also, carve a hole for the Micro-USB cable. Plug the cable into the board, stick everything together with a dab of instant glue, and voila…

Camera enclosure

We’ve got ourselves a decent looking camera.

Dock

If you’re feeling fancy, buy a small wooden desk in a hobby shop, turn it upside down and you have yourself a docking station with easy mounting. You can see how mine came out in the gallery below.

Home Assistant Integration

To create a HomeAssistant entity, we have to add a new ESPHome device with this configuration, and upload the firmware to the board. The first firmware upload will have to go through a USB cable, but from then on, the over-the-air update will be available.

ESPHome configuration

yaml


esphome:
  name: esp_cam
  platform: ESP32
  board: esp32cam

wifi:
  ssid: "**********"
  password: "**********"

  ap:
    ssid: "Esp Cam Fallback Hotspot"
    password: "***********"

captive_portal:

# Enable logging
logger:

# Enable Home Assistant API
api:

ota:

esp32_camera:
  name: My Camera
  external_clock:
    pin: GPIO0
    frequency: 20MHz
  i2c_pins:
    sda: GPIO26
    scl: GPIO27
  data_pins: [GPIO5, GPIO18, GPIO19, GPIO21, GPIO36, GPIO39, GPIO34, GPIO35]
  vsync_pin: GPIO25
  href_pin: GPIO23
  pixel_clock_pin: GPIO22
  power_down_pin: GPIO32
  resolution: 640x480
  jpeg_quality: 10

After uploading the firmware to the board via ESPHome, go to the HomeAssistant configuration page, and click Integrations. Configure the new entity which should appear when the ESP device connects to the Wi-Fi.

After adding the new integration, we can go ahead and create a new Lovelace card with the next configuration.

Lovelace card configuration

yaml


type: picture-entity
entity: camera.my_camera

That’s it! Our camera stream is now shown in the Lovelace UI panel.

I mounted the camera at a fixed spot pointed at my balcony, created a NodeRED flow to take a photo every day at noon and upload it to an external storage drive. The idea is to create a time-lapse after a couple of months.

Homeasisstant Lovelace Card