Hey everyone, I’m having trouble getting my Arducam IMX219 camera recognized on my Jetson board. Running JetPack 6.x. The camera just doesn’t show up at all — nothing in dmesg, no /dev/video devices for it.
I’ve tried flipping the ribbon cable every possible way. I have the 22-pin ribbon cable, blue end facing away from the Jetson board, pins facing away from the camera board. PCB version is v2.3.
What’s weird is I tested a different (non-Arducam) camera on the same Jetson and it works fine, so the CSI port itself seems okay.
Let’s start with some basic diagnostics. Can you run this command and paste the output?
dmesg | grep imx219
Also, if you could upload a couple of pictures showing how you’ve got the ribbon cable connected at both ends (the Jetson side and the camera board side), that would help rule out any physical connection issues.
Thanks for the quick reply. So I ran dmesg | grep imx219 and there’s literally no output at all — just returns to the prompt with nothing.
Here are pics of my connections:
As I mentioned, I’ve tried every orientation of the ribbon cable. Blue side out, blue side in, flipped at one end, flipped at both ends — nothing makes a difference. The other camera I have (not an Arducam) gets detected without any issues on this same board.
Also, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything — when you run dmesg | grep imx219, you’re getting absolutely zero lines back, correct? Not even an error or a probe failure message?
Correct — absolutely nothing. The command completes with no output whatsoever. Not a single line. It’s like the driver doesn’t even know the imx219 exists.
And yes, I went through that guide. The physical setup looks right based on the photos I shared earlier. Still no luck.
That confirms it — the native IMX219 camera driver hasn’t been enabled on your Jetson device. If the driver were loaded (even if failing to detect hardware), you’d see something in dmesg. The complete silence means the device tree overlay for IMX219 was never applied.
When you get to the configuration menu, make sure you select ‘Camera IMX219 Dual’.
This will apply the correct device tree overlay so the kernel knows to probe for the IMX219 on the CSI bus. Once that’s done, reboot and run dmesg | grep imx219 again — you should see the driver loading this time.
Both do the same thing: a terminal window pops up for a split second and then immediately closes. I can’t interact with it at all. I tried reinstalling jetson-io but that didn’t help either.
I’m on JetPack 6.. if that matters. Has anyone else seen this flashing/closing behavior with jetson-io?
That jetson-io crash-on-launch issue on JetPack 6.x is something we’ve seen before. It’s typically caused by either a Python environment conflict or a corrupted device tree configuration in the current OS installation.
At this point, the cleanest path forward is a fresh OS flash. Here’s why: in L4T 36.4.7 (part of JetPack 6.x), the IMX219 driver is actually enabled by default in the kernel. That means after a clean flash, you can skip jetson-io entirely — just plug in the camera and it should be recognized right away.
So here’s what I’d recommend:
Use NVIDIA SDK Manager to re-flash your Jetson board to a clean state.
Select JetPack 6.x targeting L4T 36.4.7.
After flashing completes, plug in the camera and test directly — no need to run jetson-io at all.
Run dmesg | grep imx219 after booting and you should see the driver probe the camera on its own.
So I went to grab L4T 36.4.7 / JetPack 6.x from NVIDIA’s site and it looks like it’s been taken down — the older 6.x releases aren’t available on their product page anymore.
The only version I can get right now is JetPack 6.2.2 with L4T 36.5.0. Is that compatible? Can I use 6.2.2 instead, or is there something specific about 36.4.7 that I need?
Quick update — I went ahead and reflashed with JetPack 6.2.1 (fresh OS install) and that did the trick. Camera is working now!
After the clean flash, jetson-io.py actually runs properly now too — no more flashing/closing. I was able to open it, activate the CSI port through the menu, and after a reboot the IMX219 showed right up in dmesg.
So for anyone else hitting the same issue: if jetson-io.py keeps crashing on launch, it might be worth just doing a fresh OS flash. Something was corrupted in my previous install and the reflash cleared it all up.
