XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense Board with Camera & Microphone

The Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 S3 Sense is an excellent compact board packed with features. Built-in Wi-Fi and BLE 5.0 make connectivity seamless, and the OV2640 camera plus digital microphone open up lots of possibilities for vision and audio-based projects. Having both 8MB PSRAM and 8MB Flash is a huge advantage for running more complex applications, including embedded ML. I really like the small form factor—it’s easy to integrate into IoT projects—and the fact that it supports battery charging makes it super practical for portable solutions. The interfaces are rich and well-documented, so getting started was smooth. Overall, this is a very capable and affordable development board for IoT, AI, and edge ML experiments. Highly recommended for makers, hobbyists, and developers!

The module I receive in June 2026 already had the newer OV3660 camera instead of the obsolete OV2640 which was advertised on Amazon. This can be checked with sensor_t *s = esp_camera_sensor_get(); Serial.printf("PID=0x%04x\n", s->id.PID); If it's 0x3660, you have the newer camera. With jpeg setting 2 and size FRAMESIZE_UXGA, you get a very nice JPEG image, about 300k large. Note: plugged right into a Mac, the camera did not always initialize, it only worked when plugged into a power USB-C hub (I used a 4-port Belkin).

I needed a small, quick to setup camera for esphome where you don't need a separate programmer. Fit the bill.

Unsurprisingly gets super hot and crashes if you stream video for short amount of time especially at higher resolutions, but has some neat applications on github and a ton of features for a tiny toy. Lots of bang for the buck and fun for a tinkerer.

Purchased 3. 1 would not boot. The other two compiled and ran the cam server. The camera is VERY low quality with maybe 25-50 dead green pixels that require software correction to hide. The first images look good but the CCD starts to warm up and loses a great deal of sensitivity. The images after being on for 30 seconds become so washed out that they lose all color and clarity. Even low resolution setting doesn’t help. After 5 mins board is too hot to touch and the picture is almost greyed out completely. It is impressive how small it is I just wished they worked better. Perhaps a different camera will give better results. I use the ESP32 seeed mcus for other IOT projects (thermometers and hygrometers) and they work fantastic for that purpose.

This new revision works well and the lower current draw from the camera keeps the temperatures below 65C usually while running wifi and camera streaming to a web server with 2 camera buffers, with a program running on the other core. Great little boards but left three stars because one of them came with 460 ohms between the battery pins, only discovered because it was idling at 83C.. Disassembled and can't see any soldering issues or component failures under the lid but these are absolutely microscopic ICs. A couple things: Don't ever connect your battery to VUSB instead of the battery pin because eventually plugging into USB will overload the VUSB diode this way, always use the battery pads. These patch antennas are spare parts, dipoles or monopoles are much much better for range and reliability of signal. I have debugged perfectly valid code for days because of the spotty antenna connections. The main source of heat seems to be the 3.3v regulator while connected to USB so try not to add extra loads to it as this board already runs hot. The castellated pads make it compatible with basically any design, so single sided SMD boards are super easy to make for it and this drone project was super fun; believe it or not all processing was done on this thing's two cores.

This was trivial to set up and stream video from it to a webpage on my home network. It’s tiny, and the only challenge was figuring out the antenna connection, but their wiki was good guidance. It’s a nice piece of kit. Programming through the Arduino ide was simple.

Works

Fa il suo dovere, non bisogna aspettarsi un granché dal microfono e in caso di operatività in parallelo (stream video, microfono, wifi, task vari) il processore arranca. Buona per piccole operazioni

El original de seedstudio, un poco más caro pero si te corre prisa va perfecto

こちらの商品を実際に使ってみて、期待していた通りの満足感を得られました。届いてから手に取った時の印象も良く、安心して使い続けられています。特に大きな不満点もなく、選んで良かったと感じております。今後も長く使っていきたいと思える一品です。同じように検討されている方にもおすすめできる商品だと感じました。

For all the RAV out there saying that this is the product to buy I can’t even get 1080 P at 30 frames a second on this device, useless. It’s just a toy, I guess

Hi, On top of the non so cheap price (€39,00) I get an invoice for custom taxes for €28.85 making a total of €67,85 ! If I had know this has to come from China, I never would have bought it !