Powering autonomous outdoor ESP32-Cam
Hi there,
I have the idea of installing some ESP32-Cams for our tennis club in order to automate the watering.
I want to put a ESP32-Cam on every tennis court and it should be powered autonomously because we don't want to install power cables. The watering system would work like that: A Raspberry Pi accesses the current camera view every 20 minutes from the ESP32-Cam via Wi-Fi and based on that image, it judges whether the court needs to be watered (and then activates a relay etc.).
The system has to run from the start of May to the end of September, every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Apart from accessing the camera view at these specific times, the camera doesn't need to be active. Flash is also never needed.
What would be the best way to power the ESP32-Cam? I have not found a fitting tutorial yet, since some are only for an ESP32 without a camera, others saying five 18650 batteries would suffice for a whole year, but math saying different things. So I wanted to ask you here.
Would batteries that are swapped every year (or few months) suffice, or would it need solar panels? There should be some hours of sun almost every day to charge since it's a outdoor tennis court. But the simpler, the better.
Can you then also specify the parts I would need so I could order them and build a prototype?