Hey everyone, hoping someone can help me out here. I’ve got a Pivistation5 Darksee and after running the usual system updates, all my image capture commands have completely stopped working. Nothing works at all now — can’t capture a single image from any of the cameras.
I ran these two commands back to back:
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt update
Right after that, every camera-related function just broke. Does anyone know how I can reload or reinstall the Pivistation5 software? I’m kind of stuck here.
Sorry to hear that. This is actually a known issue with the Pivistation5 Darksee. Can you tell me a bit more about what you’re seeing? When you say “all image capture commands stop working” — do you get any specific error messages in the terminal? Also, are you using the standard camera stack or something like libcamera / picamera2?
Yeah, so before the updates I was using the regular capture utilities that came pre-installed. After the apt commands finished and I rebooted, none of the camera tools recognize any camera hardware at all. Stuff like:
libcamera-still -o test.jpg
just returns “no cameras available” or similar. Even basic v4l2-ctl --list-devices shows nothing. It’s like the cameras have vanished from the system completely.
Thanks for the extra info — that lines up with what I suspected. Here’s what happened:
The Pivistation5 Darksee ships with a custom Raspberry Pi OS image that has specialized Arducam Pivariety camera drivers and kernel modules pre-installed. These aren’t part of the standard Raspberry Pi OS repository. When you ran sudo apt upgrade and sudo apt update, the system very likely pulled in a newer kernel or overwrote those custom driver packages with generic ones from the standard repos. That’s why the cameras just disappear — the custom modules get replaced or unloaded.
In short: standard system updates break the Arducam camera stack on this device.
Oh man, that makes sense. I had no idea the image was that customized. So what’s the fix? Is there a way to reinstall just the camera drivers, or am I looking at a full OS redo?
Unfortunately there isn’t a reliable way to just patch the camera drivers back in after they’ve been clobbered by an upgrade — too many interdependencies with the kernel modules, device tree overlays, and the Arducam software stack. The cleanest and most reliable path is to re-flash the SD card with the official Pivistation5 image.
I’ve sent you the download link for the correct B0502/B0504 Arducam Pivariety image in a private message. It’s the 2025-06-06 build based on Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (arm64).
To flash it:
Grab the Raspberry Pi Imager tool if you don’t already have it
Point it at the image file I sent you
Write it to your SD card
Pop it back in the Darksee and boot up
Everything should be back to stock — cameras and all.
Got it, I’ll grab the image from the PM and re-flash tonight. So once I’m back up and running, should I just never touch apt upgrade again? That seems… not ideal from a security standpoint.
Yeah, I get the concern — it’s a bit of a trade-off. The official recommendation for the Pivistation5 Darksee is to avoid running sudo apt upgrade (or at least be very careful with it), because the standard RPi OS kernel updates will overwrite the custom Arducam Pivariety drivers every time.
A couple of practical suggestions:
Before any updates, make a backup image of your SD card so you can roll back quickly if things break
If you do need to update specific packages for security reasons, try targeting just those packages (apt install --only-upgrade ) rather than a full-system upgrade
Keep a copy of the official image handy so you’re not scrambling to find it if things go sideways
It’s not the most elegant setup, but that’s the current state of things with the custom driver stack on this hardware. Hope the re-flash sorts you out — let us know how it goes!