Hi everyone, I’m running into a strange issue with my Jetson Orin Nano dev kit and an Arducam Jetvariety multi-array camera. When I plug the camera into the cam0 CSI port, the system seems to detect it, but I can’t actually pull any images from it. If I move the exact same camera to the cam1 port, it works fine and I get frames without any trouble. My setup is JetPack 35.3.1. Has anyone else hit this?
Thanks for the details. That’s an odd one - if it works on cam1 but not cam0, it’s usually either a port configuration issue or a known compatibility quirk. Just to confirm: when you say it’s ‘detected’ on cam0, do you see the /dev/videoX nodes come up? And what are you using to try to capture - nvgstcapture, v4l2-ctl, or something else? Any error output from the capture attempt would help narrow it down.
Right, on cam0 the video nodes do show up, so the device enumerates, but when I actually try to grab a frame it just times out and returns nothing. I’ve tried nvgstcapture and it produces no frames on cam0. The exact same command on cam1 works immediately. I also found this note in Arducam’s docs: ‘The cam0 port of the NVIDIA Orin Nano board may have some compatibility issues with Arducam Jetvariety cameras on JetPack 35.3.1 version.’ So it looks like this is a known thing?
Yep, that doc note matches what we’ve seen before. We’ve had a few similar cases where cam0 is non-functional with the Jetvariety cameras while cam1 works correctly on the Orin Nano with JetPack 35.3.1. The camera enumerates on cam0 but no image data comes through. Could you share the exact console output from nvgstcapture on cam0? I want to check whether it’s a sensor bring-up failure or just a frame timeout.
Unfortunately I don’t have the full log handy right now. What I can tell you is that it sits there for a while and then nothing happens - there’s no error that points at a specific problem. The stream just never starts producing frames on cam0, it’s that ‘no frames received’ kind of timeout. Same camera, same cable, same command on cam1 gives me a live preview right away.
Thanks, that’s helpful. Since the same camera and cable work on cam1 and cam0 at least enumerates the device, this really points to a compatibility issue rather than a cable or sensor fault. Looking into it, this looks like a compatibility problem between the Arducam Jetvariety cameras and the cam0 port specifically on JetPack 35.3.1. We’ve had other reports where cam0 was effectively dead while cam1 worked fine. There’s also some suspicion that some carrier boards may have the ports mislabeled during production, which would explain why your ‘cam0’ behaves like the incompatible port.
That’s kind of what I suspected. So is there a fix for this? I’d really prefer to use cam0 if possible, especially since the documentation says that’s the port that’s supposed to be compatible with the Jetvariety cameras. Or am I stuck using cam1?
To be straight with you: right now there’s no official solution from Arducam for getting the Jetvariety camera working on cam0 with this JetPack version. The documentation actually states that only the cam0 port is compatible with Jetvariety cameras on the Jetson Orin platform, but that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in practice - your cam1 works and cam0 doesn’t. For now, the practical workaround is to keep the camera on cam1, since that’s confirmed working on your board. We’re still tracking this internally, but I don’t have a cam0 fix or firmware update to offer at the moment.