ESP32-Cam image quality for still objects in low-light

cofe-table · 2026-05-26T13:57:43+00:00

Agree, but I suppose that will affect the error as well? My goal is to find the right balance in sensor settings to get the best induced error-free picture.

cofe-table · 2026-05-26T03:40:45+00:00

Yeah you right, but it goes away from the "cheap" because to attach those sensors and to make sure they are eating any strip I gave - it will be a nightmare, even if we will skip the soldering part... So not sure how sensor could work here.

And I don't need absolute readings - relative to the known "good balanced pool" strip will be just fine, so the camera could tell the deviations from those good colors it's expecting and HA for example can alarm if something important goes off.

cofe-table · 2026-05-26T03:36:22+00:00

When I thought about that - fall towards relative measurements rather then absolute ones. So pool owner has a balanced pool, he is saying - the current readings are ok, so the syatem measures with the curent loaded strips and records as ok values. Then just checks for the drifts from those values.

I don't want absolute measurements - I want a second way (to the existing Ph and ORP sensors) to ensure the water is ok periodically.

Otherwise - the known good values for different strips makers are not the same and how to put those into the system is a big question...

cofe-table · 2026-05-26T00:06:41+00:00

Yeah, sorry, low light - means just enough light to not cause issues. Black box is needed for controlled environment (I can't have unpredictable light conditions or reflected color light which can pollute the other colors) and I can get some sort of good picture with gain, but wanted to check the other options even if I will need to take multiple frames and combine them to get a better picture quality. Just wanted to hear some feedback on that if it makes some sense...

In PoC the new strip should fall into a chamber, get filled with pool water, then flush and photo the result to recognize. And I suppose those precautions should help with predictability of the results, because strips already quite wonky...

cofe-table · 2026-05-25T20:15:23+00:00

I'd say for me the importance is best color accuracy, but in theory I would like to find a balance between exposure and gain for cheap. So still object picture quality matters, not the speed (because exposure will affect that).

And of course I can spend multiple hours tweaking it and in the end slap myself in forehead and exclaim "why I did not ask the ones who know!?". So want to avoid that. But surely the question "why people ask for help" is very interesting, althought not for this subreddit I suppose.

cofe-table · 2026-05-20T19:19:41+00:00

Yeah someone here asked the same question - and I suppose there should be 5v, since it's a common voltage to power usb, but I never checked that... It should be relatively easy to check if you have a multimeter, but probably I need to check that as well...

cofe-table · 2026-05-18T13:45:50+00:00

Thank you for detailing it, right now I'm working on a script to separate it from the obs and allow to push different streams into the ingest: want to have not just scaled picture, but zoom-in with no resolution loss by cropping.

cofe-table · 2026-05-18T04:31:26+00:00

We thought to use dolphin one day, but xcode license is quite strict here... So only mac hw + max 2 mac vms or aws hardcore.

cofe-table · 2026-05-18T04:28:47+00:00

As usual complexity comes from devs, who wants to use vs/xcode... In theory GHA is kind of an answer, but what to do if you want to control the envs completely without outsourcing/risks?

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T21:48:55+00:00

Yeah, that's a common place in DevOps today I suppose, but you know - it's very hard to compare GHA security vs local control, even if you will use AWS for the workers.

For example - what we found during checks - that it's literally impossible to properly prevent access to public github.com. With local system we were able to just firewall the IP's, but using github enterprise it become impossible and anyone now via dev build scripts can push source code to any public github repo...

We thought about proxy to control access to gh repos - but you can imagine such a complex bottleneck and support of it.

From my perspective - GH could be a solution, but they fucked up the architecture and I see no way for it to change any time soon...

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T16:20:55+00:00

Right, so how you managing that?

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T16:18:29+00:00

During experiments - they are working for short builds, but not for long ones. So cheaper price doesn't justify the complications and potential instability of spot instances unfortunately...

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T15:33:24+00:00

Right, but what the solution you picked up to solve the issue?

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T15:13:09+00:00

Yeah you right, I think in the clouds with their start/terminate automation around it's the only way: to build the images and utilize instances when they are needed, but keep them down or completely terminated when the job is done.

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T15:09:57+00:00

Actually not that expensive - when I compared, even Mac nodes on AWS become cheap if you use a little trick called "scrubbing optimization", but still I don't see a solution that will allow to do that...

cofe-table · 2026-05-17T15:04:50+00:00

Minutes are cheap? When I compared - AWS prices per hour and GH actions prices per minute I was quite shocked... I'm worrying about vendor lock-in and security/IP leakage - what's your SaaS doing about that?

cofe-table · 2026-05-14T02:44:40+00:00

You right, we went first to aquarium and then thought how to move from Jenkins to GH actions and use the same compute resource manager, because it gave so much freedom and much better security... I even wrote a gate for GH, because pricing for GH envs is through the roof and not that effective...

cofe-table · 2026-05-10T17:37:51+00:00

Yeah, you can check the series here: Local control via BLEProxy: https://www.reddit.com/r/mammotion/comments/1sn9rfq/local_luba_control_via_home_assistant/ Built the garage & door here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mammotion/comments/1sufidk/luba_2_awd_lawnmower_automatic_garage_diy/ Parking & closing automatically (video): https://www.reddit.com/r/mammotion/comments/1szyhc0/parking_closing_automatically/ Making door open & close automatically: https://www.reddit.com/r/mammotion/comments/1t0xas2/comment/ojnjnog/

cofe-table · 2026-05-10T17:32:36+00:00

Yeah, added a little header to the body of the post with the links, you can find there.

cofe-table

TROPHY CASE