I have just received the board and sad to say I cannot upload code to the camera when it is plugged into the board as I receive the following error message
Have I misunderstood the purpose an/or operation of this board
Naturally I have tried pressing the reset button when the IDE displayed the "Uploading" message but to no avail
Sorry to hear this, if you have a standard ESP32-CAM plugged into this board correctly then you should be able to automatically program your board without needing to press any buttons or manually put it into programming mode. It should automatically do this from the Arduino IDE via a USB cable connected to the USB port of the adapter board.
The error message you’ve posted just seems to be a generic ‘I can’t talk to the board for some reason’ error so the problem could be a number of things.
The first thing I would suggest is checking that the USB driver is actually installed properly. To do this open up device manager by right-clicking the windows icon in the bottom left of your screen and then selecting device manager from the menu that pops up.
In device manager the interface board should be listed under Ports (COM & LPT) -> USB-SERIAL CH340 (COMx).
Check that there is no error message or yellow caution triangle listed by the entry.
If there is more than one COM port listed you can confirm which is the correct one by unplugging the adapter board then plugging it back in to see which COM port in device manager disappears and reappears.
Another way to confirm the COM port is working is to open up the serial monitor window in the Arduino IDE by going to Tools-Serial monitor
In the Serial monitor window make sure you have the BAUD rate set to 115200.
Next, press the reset button on the adapter board. If you have the same model of ESP32-CAM we stock you should see some information reported by your ESP32.
Once you’ve tried the above and the driver seems to be ok the next thing I would suggest checking is the settings in your Arduino IDE. I’ve pasted below settings that work for the adapterboard+EP32-CAM we stock.
EPS32_CAM_settings.jpg
Also it may be worth taking a look at our setup guide for our ESP32-CAM just in case you spot something you may be doing differently. You can find the guide in the first post of this thread which includes setting up the IDE and flashing the example webcam sketch:
viewtopic.php?f=134&t=3041&p=8384&hilit=esp32+cam#p8384