ESP32 Mini OLED Webcam Stream
16 Apr 2026(Updated 8 May 2026)
What started as curiosity about small displays turned into a full creative tech experiment. The ESP32 hosts a web page over HTTPS (so mobile browsers allow camera access), and the browser handles everything: face detection, dithering, style rendering. The ESP32 just receives a 1024-byte frame and draws it.
The entire project lives in a single Arduino sketch file on purpose. I wanted someone who's never touched an ESP32 before to be able to open one file, paste in their WiFi credentials and a certificate, and hit upload. No library maze, no folder structure to get wrong. If you can get the Arduino IDE running, you can get this working.
It works on phones too. You can walk around with your iPhone or Android, watching this tiny screen try to make sense of your face at one bit per pixel. The result is lo-fi, sometimes barely recognizable, and honestly pretty funny.
Seven styles are live-switchable: Dithered, Edges, Motion Trail, Scanlines, Skull, Glitch, and SHODAN (from the classic game System Shock). The last two use MediaPipe Face Landmarker to track facial features and overlay custom graphics.
Built with an ESP32 dev board, a 0.96-inch SSD1306 OLED, and four jumper wires.
