PhoneStand

Face-tracking Phone Stand using Arduino, ESP32 and cameras. We wanted to create a phone stand which rotates to keep the user’s face at the center of the screen. Made along with Sandor Felber and Rohit Karmarkar.

Hardware

• Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense
• ESP32-DEVKITC-32D
• ESP32-CAM WiFi
• Stepper Motor
• Stepper Motor Driver

We found that OmniVision OV7670 camera module had too low frame rate when used with Arduino Nano.

Files

Files relevant in the final demo

• arduino/
  • serialInput: Receive turn command from Serial and turn the motor accordingly
  • Makefile: Arduino CLI Commands for flashing sketches
• esp32/
  • BasicWebServer: Sketch for ESP32 CAM to connect to my home WiFi and stream the camera input
• python/
  • process.py: Takes input stream from my ESP32CAM URL, and outputs to my Serial whether to turn left or right for the phone stand

Other files:

• arduino/:
  • drawimage: A Processing sketch for displaying OmniVision camera input coming from Serial via rawbytes sketch
  • omnivision: Print the raw input from the camera as hex for debugging
  • originalMotor: Sketch to turn the motor through a driver
  • rawbytes: Print raw bytes to my serial port for Processing to take and show the image.
• python/:
  • face-detection.ipynb: Notebook to debug face detection pipeline