During the whole December 2024 month, we tested various ESP32 camera board to finally select the XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense board! The main criterion was to have enough pins left to connect an SPI LoRa radio module. 3 boards offer this capabilities: `Freenove ESP32-S3 WROOM`, `Freenove ESP32 WROVER v1.6` and `XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense`. The choice was finally set to the `XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense` which has a huge developer community and enough resource to run embedded AI processing that we want to add in the future in a quite compact format.
We released on the PEPR AgriFutur GitHub a PoC of a smart image sensor device based on XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with an OV2640 camera capable of periodically capturing and transmitting with LoRa radio a small size image, typically 128×128, in a robust encoding image format. Proper casing for outdoor deployment will follow.
