Hello I was wondering if a CMOS image sensor will work without its lenses, I want to install a pinhole instead of the lenses, I want to simulate a sun sensor with the CMOS image sensor of an ESP32-CAM, something like this:
As you see, the CMOS image sensor is the matrix.
Yes, but it probably won't perform as well as a lensed system with an aperture stop, or, depending on how much detail you want to see, a good lensed system with a neutral-gray filter.
Pinhole cameras are nice because they have theoretically infinite depth of field, but as the ratio of aperture vs. wavelength gets smaller, issues with diffraction will get worse.
To get those famously crisp pinhole-camera images that you may have seen, you need to use very large-format film, which allows for large-format pinholes.