Hi folks, hoping someone can help before I tear my hair out. I’m trying to get an Arducam 16MP IMX519 camera working on a Raspberry Pi 4B and it’s failing right at the install stage.
Setup: Raspberry Pi 4B, brand new clean install of the latest Raspbian Bullseye, Hardware Revision b03114, Kernel Version 5.15.61-v7l+. The package I’m installing is imx519_kernel_driver_low_speed – bullseye-v5.
The script bails out with:
Cannot find the corresponding package, please send the following information to [email protected]
Hardware Revision: b03114
Kernel Version: 5.15.61-v7l+
Package: imx519_kernel_driver_low_speed – bullseye-v5
You are using an unsupported kernel version, please install the official SD Card image(do not execute rpi-update): Raspberry Pi OS downloads – Raspberry Pi
I’m on the official image and I haven’t run rpi-update, so I’m stumped. Any idea what’s going on? I really need this camera working for a project.
Thanks for all the detail, that’s exactly what we need. We’ve raised this with Arducam and they’ve made an update on their side that should address the unsupported kernel version message you’re seeing. Could you please try the install again and let us know how it goes?
Bit of an update. After the fix the driver actually installs now, and the camera works fine using the standard libcamera commands, so nothing wrong with the Pi, the cable or the camera itself.
The problem now is the pictures are out of focus, because the ArduCam build of libcamera (the one that enables autofocus and manual focus) isn’t installed yet. And when I try to install the ArduCam version of libcamera, nothing works at all. The libcamera packages can’t be found. The first line of the script errors out saying the URL can’t be found, and the rest of the script just seems to remove libcamera. The last few entries are me trying to use libcamera with bash reporting no such file or directory, which confirms the software has been removed, and I have to rebuild the image from scratch.
I’ve rebuilt the Pi a number of times using the latest full Raspbian build with the same result every time. One thing I noticed: to even load the driver you have to NOT update the installed image. The latest Raspbian image was released in April and there are 191 updated packages for that build at this time. Attaching the terminal output from when I started the ArduCam libcamera install using the provided script.
Couple of suggestions. First, it might be worth trying an older Buster image instead of Bullseye, there were a lot of changes between Buster and Bullseye, and while our products have been updated to work on Bullseye we tend to see fewer issues on the older versions. Something like raspios_armhf-2021-05-28 might be a good one to try.
Second, if you can attach the full terminal output from the libcamera install attempt that would really help us dig in, this is the first instance of this issue we’ve seen.
Got it working! It turned out to be a copy/paste issue. If you copy the whole Arducam libcamera section of the instructions in one go, it only performs the first install on the list and does not do the second one which re-installs the libcamera apps. You need to copy and paste each line separately. Do that and the camera works.
For anyone else following along: the Arducam site says to use the latest full build and links to the April 2022 Bullseye release, and also says you should not update after installing the build. The Raspberry Pi Foundation Bullseye changes have made camera stuff very difficult, most applications that use cameras also now don’t work. I use Buster for other stuff anyway. I’ll now be testing the camera against the v2 and HD cameras in real live situations. It would help a lot if Arducam separated out those two build lines or explained that each must be run separately.
Nice one, glad you cracked it. Good catch on the copy/paste, that’s going to help a lot of people. Do report back on how it compares to your v2 and HD cameras in real use.
Spoke a bit too soon. I installed the full version of Buster and the Arducam driver doesn’t work with it. The install doesn’t throw any obvious errors, but after a reboot there’s no imx519 driver and no camera in /dev/video0. So Buster is out for me, back to fighting with Bullseye.
New development. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new version of Bullseye dated 6 September 2022 and the Arducam drivers don’t work with this version. The driver only seems to work with the April 2022 version of Bullseye and only if you don’t upgrade it. A product that only works with one OS version and stops working every time the software version is updated (or you just run apt upgrade) is not tenable.
My environment: Hardware Revision b03114, Kernel Version 5.15.61-v7l+, OS Codename bullseye, ARCH armv7l, new Bullseye dated 6 September 2022.
Your camera is ,and the relevant drivers have been installed.
pi@RPiTest:~ $ dmesg | grep imx519
pi@RPiTest:~ $ ls /dev/video0
ls: cannot access ‘/dev/video0’: No such file or directory
pi@RPiTest:~ $
It says the driver installed but nothing is, and there’s no video0 directory.
Thanks, that’s all useful. Everything in your environment looks like it installed successfully, so we need a bit more information before we can go any further. Could you grab a full bug report from the device?
That will output an arducam-bug-report.txt in the current directory, please attach that file and we’ll take a look.
One other thing to double check: the behaviour you’re describing (install reports success but there’s no driver, no camera and no /dev/video0) isn’t normal. Did you reboot after installing the driver? It’s likely the driver won’t be activated until you do. Let us know on both and we’ll take it from there, still being diagnosed at the moment.