Arducam B0342 intermittent USB timeout and create errors on Jetson Nano/Xavier NX Ubuntu

USB UVC Webcams
1

Hi everyone. I’m having a problem with a B0342 camera on Ubuntu (Jetson Nano/Xavier NX camera series). The camera works intermittently and is quite unstable. Sometimes the image shows up fine, but other times I get USB_CAMERA_USB_TIMEOUT_ERROR and the serial output looks garbled. A few of the cameras don’t show any image at all and just return USB_CAMERA_USB_CREATE_ERROR. Has anyone run into this before?

2

Sorry to hear that. Can you share a bit more about your setup? Specifically how the camera is connected to the host, which software/demo you’re running, and the exact commands you’re using. If you can also paste the full terminal output for the failures, that would help a lot.

3

Sure. The MIPI camera is connected to the UC board on Channel A, and then a USB 3.0 cable runs from the UC board to the PC. On the software side I’m using the ArduCAM_USB_Camera_Shield_Python_Demo from your GitHub repo.

4

Thanks. Could you post the exact command lines you’re running and the output when it fails? Since you’re seeing two different errors, logs for both scenarios would be ideal - one for the timeout case and one for the ‘no image’ case.

5

Here are the two commands I’ve been trying:

python3 ArduCam_Demo.py -v --preview-width 1280 -f USB3.0_UC-593_Rev.C/MIPI/IMX219/stereo/1920x1080/RAW10_8b/IMX219_2Lane_1920x1080_RAW10_8b_B.cfg

python3 ArduCam_Demo.py -v --preview-width 1280 -f USB3.0_UC-593_Rev.C/MIPI/IMX219/Channel_A/RAW10_8b/IMX219_MIPI_2Lane_RAW10_8b_1920x1080.cfg

6

And here is the output when it times out:

[TIMEOUT]
color mode 2
Serial: L#-°Þ-î¦Ñ
{‘version’: ‘v0.2’, ‘year’: 2, ‘mouth’: 2, ‘day’: 2}
{‘fw_version’: ‘v3.20’, ‘interface’: 3, ‘device’: 3}
Capture began, Error : USB_CAMERA_NO_ERROR
fps: 1
timeout
fps: 1
timeout
fps: 1
timeout
Error capture image, Error : USB_CAMERA_USB_TIMEOUT_ERROR
Error capture image, Error : USB_CAMERA_USB_TIMEOUT_ERROR
Error capture image, Error : USB_CAMERA_USB_TIMEOUT_ERROR

7

For the cameras that don’t show anything at all, this is what I get instead:

[CREATE]
color mode 2
open fail, Error : USB_CAMERA_USB_CREATE_ERROR
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “ArduCam_Demo.py”, line 51, in
raise RuntimeError(“Failed to open camera.”)
RuntimeError: Failed to open camera.

8

Thanks for all the details. One thing stands out to me: the B0342 is a MIPI camera, but the errors you’re seeing - USB_CAMERA_USB_TIMEOUT_ERROR and USB_CAMERA_USB_CREATE_ERROR - are USB camera errors. That’s a bit of a mismatch. Also, the garbled serial output (Serial: L#-°Þ-î¦Ñ) suggests the USB link isn’t reading the device info cleanly, so something about the actual hardware/software configuration may not match what the demo expects.

9

Before we go deeper, could you share any additional details that might clear up the discrepancy between the MIPI camera model and the USB camera error logs? For example, how exactly the camera is wired to the UC board, whether you’ve tried a different USB cable or port, and whether the same camera fails consistently or randomly. For now the root cause isn’t determined yet - the mismatch between the reported MIPI model and the USB errors means we’re missing some info about the actual setup. Once you can provide that, we can continue troubleshooting.