Buckle up buttercup this is a heck of a ride. I bought these because they have a neato peachy keen programmer. They came in I ran blink on pin 4 (the white LED in the front) and after I could see again I set up the basic camerawebserver sketch in the examples. One worked and the camera module in the other wouldn’t register. So I thought “hey that was pretty durn slick!” I bought some servos and three more camera modules so that I could build a few projects I thought were pretty neat.
got them in put them in the programmer loaded up blink and LO AND BEHOLD I got the no connection error of DOOM. So I went into engineer troubleshooting mode and was like what is different between the two modules and what is the expected fail rate of each. On amazon I was seeing comments like ‘I bough a bunch and they were all dead on arrival’. That didn’t bode well. Also they were different manufacturers and different board layouts, the original ones had way more passive devices on the top. I did some tinkering and decided to buy a pair that looked just like the original two… same problems.
So a discussion here needs to be added about the grounding of IO0 when uploading. the original ones didn’t need it. There is a button labeled IO0 on the programmer. I tried grounding it when I plugged it in and it uploaded, but no blinky blinky. What ACTUALLY needs to happen is. short IO0 to ground (or just push the button) for a few seconds when you PLUG THE PROGRAMMER INTO THE USB with the MODULE PLUGGED IN. Then after your code is uploaded, for some reason you have to unplug it, plug it in, un plug it, then plug it in, then it starts working.
I have since loaded and run them all with the example camera webserver and they all work. even the flakey camera I just needed to reseat it into the connector better. There is a lot of neat projects for these little camera modules and now I get to make more of them than I expected.
of course now that I’ve had seven of them show up, I have to take down all the Halloween before I can really play with them… 
