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Pinned by sophia_anderson
Adafruit Memento Time-lapse w/ online upload & email notification
Adafruit Memento Time-lapse Camera with Online Upload and Email Notification
This guide shows how to turn your Adafruit Memento (ESP32-S3) board into a time-lapse camera that:
- Captures images on a schedule or with a button press
- Uploads them to Adafruit IO over Wi-Fi
- Triggers email notifications using a feed
- All using CircuitPython and the PyCamera library!What You Need
- Adafruit Memento Board: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5843
- microSD card (optional, for GIF recording)
- USB-C cable
- Wi-Fi network
- Adafruit IO account: https://io.adafruit.com
- CircuitPython is installed on the MementoSetup
1. Installing CircuitPython
To install CircuitPython on the Adafruit Memento, I followed this official guide by Anne Barela and John Park:
🔗 [Memento Camera Quick Start Guide – Install CircuitPython](https://learn.adafruit.com/memento-camera-quick-start-guide/install-circuitpython)
That page walks you through how to:
- Put the board into bootloader mode (double-tap reset)
- Drag the `.uf2` file onto the board
- Verify that the **CIRCUITPY** drive appearsMake sure you use **CircuitPython 9.0.0 or later** to avoid filesystem corruption issues.
2. Install Libraries
- adafruit_io
- adafruit_requests.mpy
- adafruit_ntp.mpy
- adafruit_logging.mpy
- adafruit_pycamera
- adafruit_ov5640
- adafruit_connection_manager.mpy
- gifio.mpy
- bitmaptools.mpy
- ulab (folder)3. Create settings.toml file on CIRCUITPY with this:
CIRCUITPY_WIFI_SSID = "YourNetworkName"
CIRCUITPY_WIFI_PASSWORD = "YourNetworkPassword"
ADAFRUIT_AIO_USERNAME = "your_username"
ADAFRUIT_AIO_KEY = "your_aio_key"4. Main Code
Paste the following into code.py on your CIRCUITPY drive:
What I did
- I used the fancy camera CircuitPython code by Anne Barela and John Park, and the Doorbell Camera code by Brent Rubell to help create the code above.
- My main focus was to get photos uploaded to Adafruit IO with the timelapse and camera shutter options.
How It Works
- The camera connects to Wi-Fi and Adafruit IO
- Takes snapshots using the shutter button or on a time-lapse interval
- Encodes image data as base64 and uploads to Adafruit IO feed
- Sends a "trigger" signal to another feed to notify you via email5. Set up Feeds on Adafruit IO
- Go to io.adafruit.com
- Click on the tab 'IO'
- Go to Feeds and create two. I set up a 'camera' feed and a 'camera-trigger' feed.
- The "camera" feed will take photo uploads, and the "camera-trigger" feed gets a 1 or 0; this is used to trigger an automated email action.
