Hi everyone. I’m running a Raspberry Pi 4B with Bookworm and just finished the Arducam imx519 starter guide - the camera is brand new. Everything installed with no errors, but libcamera reports no cameras detected and dmesg shows:
[ 8.698993] imx519 0-001a: failed to read chip id 519, with error -5
[ 8.711077] imx519: probe of 0-001a failed with error -5
Does this mean the camera is dead? I was on Bullseye before and had libcamera update/install errors, so I switched to Bookworm. I’ve been careful with antistatic handling, and I was about to test the camera on a Pi Zero to rule out the sensor itself.
That error means the kernel can’t read the chip ID from the imx519 over I2C (error -5), so the Pi isn’t communicating with the sensor at all. It doesn’t automatically mean the camera is dead - usually it’s a connection or config issue.
Can you post photos of the hardware connection at both ends - the Raspberry Pi side and the camera side? I’d like to check the ribbon orientation and seating. Root cause isn’t determined yet, so we’ll work through it.
Make it executable:
chmod +x ./arducam-camera-bug-report
Run it:
./arducam-camera-bug-report
That writes an arducam-bug-report.txt file in the current directory. Attach that file to your next reply - it collects the diagnostic info needed to analyze the detection failure.
Quick update: I gave up on Bookworm and reverted to Bullseye. After updating the OS and libcamera, the camera is now detected and producing images, so the sensor is fine. But autofocus isn’t working - the image is pretty fuzzy with libcamera-still --autofocus-mode auto -o test.jpg.
One confusing thing: vcgencmd get_camera still says no cameras detected. I found out that command only works for the legacy stack. libcamera-hello --list-cameras gives this:
The imx519 does work on Bookworm, so the earlier detection failure was most likely a missed step during the Bookworm setup rather than a driver incompatibility - but without the config.txt and libcamera version from that attempt, it’s hard to say which step. Since Bullseye is working for you now, let’s focus there.
On the autofocus: if the focus motor isn’t initializing, you’ll normally see errors like:
Can you run libcamera-still --autofocus-mode auto -o test.jpg again and paste the full terminal output? That will show whether the lens controller (ak7375) is being detected. For a basic still, also try libcamera-still -t 8000 -o test.jpg. And stick with the libcamera tools for detection - vcgencmd get_camera is legacy-stack only, so it’ll always report no cameras here; your libcamera-hello --list-cameras output already confirms the sensor is detected.