**Process**:

A while ago, I've been experimenting the relatively new Parallel IO (PARLIO) peripheral, and it was very great and more suitable for general use. I was able to emulate a lot of peripherals and I thought that the DVP (Digital Video Port) peripheral can be replicated with the PARLIO peripheral.

I wanted to develop a simple monitoring camera and I tested this out firstly on the ESP32-C6 to connect with an OV2640 with JPEG output. It worked and turned out great, but since it doesn't have PSRAM, the resolution was limited to around SVGA (depending on the free RAM). I then developed for the ESP32-C5 when it released since it also has the PARLIO peripheral. It is quite unfortunate that ESP32-C5 has limited bit-width compared to ESP32-C6 (8-bit compared to 16-bit), but at least it has PSRAM.

The suggested SPI cameras are good for image processing, but not for surveillance as either some of the cameras I found has low resolution (VGA typically) or Arducam SPI cameras with 5MP (quite slow and quite expensive).

**Result:**

With some optimizations, I can achieve around 30Mbps (32Mbps AP) TCP and was able to stream \~20FPS at full resolution (2048x1536) at a fair quality on OV3660 with some PLL tweaks (shown in the video).  
I've also tested on OV5640 beforehand, but the image quality degrades at lower resolutions and I was able to get \~15FPS at full resolution (2592x1944), and 20FPS at QHD (2560x1440).  
I no longer need to combine ESP32-P4 + ESP32-C5 for this use case, potentially reducing the BOM cost.

**Applications:**

* Cost effective, single chip solution surveillance camera (ESP32-C5 has dual-band Wi-Fi 6)
* Cheap DVP to SPI/UART/LCD bridge camera module, allowing customized configurations (e.g. maximum rate)
* Dual camera (DVP + SPI) setup

  
I have developed **esp\_cam\_io\_parl** for a while now, and I believe it is near ready. But currently it is only available as an ESP-IDF component, and only JPEG images are supported:

ESP-IDF component page: [esp\_cam\_io\_parl](https://components.espressif.com/components/haqqscripter/esp_cam_io_parl)  
You can also learn more about it on the [Espressif Forum](https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=46464) page.

Parallel IO: Streaming images with DVP cameras on ESP32-C5