Hey everyone, I’m having a pretty frustrating issue with my Arducam 12MP B016712MP camera on a Jetson Orin NX running SDK 5.1.6. The image output is completely distorted — colors are all wrong and the picture is garbled. On top of that, Argus only works the very first time after a fresh boot. If I try to launch it again, it just crashes and I’m forced to do a full reset. Anyone run into something like this before?
That sounds rough. Can you share a bit more about your setup? Some photos of the distorted output would really help, and it’d be good to know what carrier board you’re running the module on.
Yeah, here are a couple of photos showing what I’m getting:
I also tried messing with the lens focus, thinking maybe it was just badly out of focus, but that didn’t change anything — the distortion is still there regardless of how I adjust it.
Thanks for the photos. Taking a close look at your setup — I can see you’re using a third-party carrier board, not the official NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX Developer Kit carrier. That’s almost certainly where the trouble is coming from.
Yeah, it’s a custom carrier board from another vendor. Physically the camera connects fine though — is the carrier board really enough to cause all this?
Unfortunately yes, and this is a pretty common pitfall. Here’s the core issue: third-party carrier boards frequently have different pin definitions, I2C bus assignments, and CSI lane mappings compared to the official NVIDIA Developer Kit. Our Arducam drivers and ISP tuning configurations are compiled and validated exclusively against the official dev kit’s hardware layout. When the driver expects the sensor at a specific I2C address or on a particular CSI lane and the custom board has it routed differently, the sensor initialization goes sideways — and that produces exactly the kind of garbled, distorted output you’re seeing.
As for the Argus crashing after the first startup — that’s a separate but related problem, and it likely comes down to I2C signal stability on your custom board. If the I2C signals aren’t clean, the sensor might manage a partial initialization on the first attempt, but the state gets corrupted in a way that prevents subsequent initializations from succeeding. That would explain why only a hard reset gets it back to a working state temporarily.
Here’s what I’d recommend as next steps:
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If you can get access to an Official NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX Developer Kit, test the Arducam 12MP module on it. That’ll tell you definitively whether the camera module itself is fine and the custom board is the culprit.
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For the third-party board, carefully double-check the ribbon cable connection layout. Some custom boards have I2C or camera control pin definitions that don’t align with the standard Jetson pinout, and even a single mismapped pin can break everything.
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If you have access to a scope or logic analyzer, check the I2C signal integrity on the custom board. Stability there is absolutely critical for reliable sensor initialization.
Okay, that’s a really clear explanation — thanks. I don’t have an official dev kit on hand right now but I’ll see if I can borrow one to run that test. In the meantime I’ll go through the ribbon cable pinout and probe the I2C lines on our board. Appreciate the help.
No problem. Just to wrap up with the key takeaway: our Arducam drivers, ISP tuning parameters, and overall camera support are validated exclusively against the Official NVIDIA Developer Kit carrier board. Third-party carrier boards bring in hardware-level variations — different I2C routing, CSI lane assignments, Device Tree configurations — that fall outside our validation scope. Those differences are the root cause behind both the Argus crashes and the sensor initialization failures you’re hitting. If the camera checks out fine on an official dev kit, you’ll know with certainty that the custom board is where the investigation needs to focus.