Hey everyone, I’m having trouble getting my Arducam 5MP OV5647 to be detected on my Raspberry Pi. I’ve tried it on both a Pi 4 Model B and a Pi 5 — nothing shows up. On the Pi 5 I tested both CSI ports, and on the Pi 4 I tested the single CSI port. I’ve followed the setup guide on the Arducam docs site for the OV5647, and I’ve tried both 64-bit Bookworm and the legacy 32-bit Bullseye OS. I also swapped between two different ribbon cables that I had on hand. No luck with any combination — the camera just doesn’t appear at all. Has anyone run into this before? What else can I try?
Sorry to hear you’re hitting this. Let’s get some diagnostic data so we can figure out what’s going on. Could you do the following on the Pi you’re currently testing with?
First, reboot your device. Then run these commands to grab our bug report tool:
wget -O arducam-camera-bug-report https://github.com/Dion4cen/arducam-camera-bug-report/releases/download/Tool/arducam-camera-bug-report
chmod +x ./arducam-camera-bug-report
./arducam-camera-bug-report
This will generate an arducam-bug-report.txt file in the current directory. Please attach that here, and if you can also snap a few photos of how the camera is connected to the board (the cable seating on both ends), that would help a lot.
Here’s the bug report and some photos of my setup:
Bug report: arducam-bug-report.txt
Connection photos:
For reference, this is the Arducam 5MP OV5647. I’m running on a Pi 4B and a Pi 5, and I followed the native camera setup guide from the Arducam docs. Tried both 64-bit Bookworm and 32-bit Bullseye, two different cables, and all available CSI ports. Still nothing.
Thanks for the report and photos. I’ve gone through the bug report and your connection setup looks correct from what I can see — cable orientation and seating appear fine on both ends, and the config seems in order.
That said, the most common culprit with these symptoms is actually a faulty ribbon cable, even if it looks okay physically. The CSI cables can be pretty fragile. Since you mentioned you tried two cables already — were those from the same source/purchase, or were they known-good cables that work with other cameras? If you have a third cable that you know works with another CSI camera, could you give that a shot and then re-run the bug report tool?
Good call. I grabbed a different cable — this one I know works fine with another camera module I have — and tested with it. Unfortunately, same result. Camera still isn’t detected.
Updated bug report: arducam-bug-report.txt
Photos with the new cable:
So at this point we’ve ruled out: the Pi itself (tested on two different boards), the OS (two different OS versions), the CSI port (tried all available ports), and the cable (three different cables, one known-good). Pretty much just leaves the camera module, right?
Yeah, I think you’ve narrowed it down about as far as we can go. The configuration looks fine, the cable’s been ruled out with a known-good one, and you’ve tested across different Pi models and OS versions. At this stage the camera module itself is the most likely culprit — probably a hardware fault on the board.
I’ve sent you a private message with the next steps to get this resolved. Check your inbox and we’ll take it from there.