Did anyone try to power the module directly with 3.3V (from a buck converter that is able to provide enough current) instead of 5V from USB?
I would expect, that the ESP32S3 attached with camera module can run significantly cooler because the onboard LDO converter from 5V → 3.3V no longer needs to convert voltage difference into heat.
Meanwhile I tried by myself by attaching an external 3.3V voltage regulator (a Pololu D36V6F3), feeding the 3.3V directly to the 3V3 pin of the ESP32S3 board.
The Pololu buck converter has a wide input voltage range of 4V … 50V. When I feed the buck converter Vin pin with 5V, it draws around 420 mA, when camera and WiFi are operating at full power to provide a continuous video stream.
Assuming an efficiency of the buck converter around 90%, this means, at 3.3V, the board draws around 580mA!
This means, the Pololu voltage regulator already operates at it’s limit and also gets very hot. The advantage now is, that the ESP32S3 board is running less hot than before, when the 5V → 3.3V reduction has to happen on the boards integrated LDO regulator (which has much less efficiency than the switching regulator).
This is, how it looks like:
For reference, according to the schematic, the 3.3V regulator in the XIAO_ESP32S3 is the SGM6029 buck converter with 95% efficiency.
Too much heat when camera is enabled
when is configured to HD resolution with mjpeg stream, temperature goes to almost 100 °C with two heatsinks… supply current is about 300mA * 5V = 1.5W → it is too much for so small device
heat come from board with ESP chip and also from camera sensor itself.
to decrease heat from ESP is good to decrease xclk_freq from 20MHz to 10 or less (but not less than 2MHz), with lover xclk is more noticeable rolling shutter.
also i tried decrease cpu speed from 240MHz to 80, but with not significant difference (about 3 °C less)
in comparison with china esp32-cam - this cheap camera eat at 5V about 180mA with same program. so I think there is room for improvements.
also the sensor has very low aperture and also very small lens is there. you need so much light to take good picture
I do all tests with micropython-camera-API
is good to notice that some GPIO pins are shared with SD card slot and their are not usable when SD is used - I found this only in schematic and not in product description.