Sir,
I recently purchase your esp32 cam project book, I do not have as yet an FTDI programmer board, what can I use in its place for now.
Thanking you in advance.
If you have another Arduino with a USB port there are quite a number of articles on the net about how to use them to program the ESP32-CAM including this one – Program ESP32-CAM using Arduino UNO. Most people start out with an UNO before moving to esoteric boards like the ESP32-CAM.
I did not have much luck using that method. It would always give me a successfully uploaded message but would fail with an “Unknown camera type”. I finally bought this tiny board from Amazon and a USB-C to Micro-USB cable (I use a Mac with only Thunderbolt/USB-C ports) and everything works perfectly now.