Hi everyone. I’ve got an Arducam Multi-camera adapter module V2.22 connected to my Raspberry Pi and I’m having a weird issue with the camera preview. Basically the screen moves/updates roughly every 10 seconds during the camera turn-on test, like the frames are degrading badly.
This is my first time connecting this setup, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s a 32-bit vs 64-bit OS issue, RAM size, not enough current, or something software/hardware related. Has anyone seen this before?
Thanks for the details. Can you clarify a bit what you mean by “the camera screen moves every 10 seconds”? Is the preview freezing and then jumping, or is it more like a lag/delay issue? The more specific you can be about the symptom, the easier it’ll be to narrow down whether this is a power/current problem, an OS issue, or something on the software side.
Sorry, I should have explained better. I’m running libcamera-hello and the preview gets transmitted, but then it disconnects after a bit, and the colors also change during the preview. The camera I’m using is an IMX708 infrared model. So the screen comes up, then drops, and the colors shift. It’s hard to describe exactly, so let me know if you need more info.
That does sound a bit unusual, especially the color change part. I’m a little confused by the description, to be honest. Could you record a short video of what’s happening on screen while libcamera-hello is running? That would help a lot in understanding exactly what you’re seeing.
Thanks for the video. Let’s isolate whether this is specific to one camera or affects the adapter as a whole. Can you test each camera individually using these commands?
libcamera-still -t 0 --camera 0
or:
libcamera-still -t 0 --camera 1
This will help us figure out if it’s one particular camera misbehaving or something more general with the setup.
I tried connecting two cameras and it’s still slow. With 30 frames it’s showing an extremely slow speed, like a crazy slow frame rate. I ran the individual camera test commands you suggested and the result is the same with both. Is there a solution for this?
Looking at your video, I can see the issue now. It looks like you’re connecting to the Raspberry Pi over VNC, which introduces a lot of lag in the camera preview. That’s why the preview appears to move so slowly and update in chunks.
Can you connect your RPi directly to a display (HDMI monitor or similar) and try the same test? The VNC connection itself is very likely the bottleneck here, so we need to rule that out before digging into the camera or adapter hardware.
That was it! Connecting the Pi directly to a display fixed the slowness. Thanks for the help.
One follow-up question though: if I want to use the IMX708 with the Multi Adapter to stream video in real time to a web server (kind of like a CCTV setup), will I run into the same problem again?
Glad to hear the direct display connection solved it. To answer your follow-up: streaming over a web server will still have some lag, but it should be noticeably better than what you saw over VNC. VNC is particularly heavy for live video preview because of how it handles screen updates.
For a CCTV-style use case with the IMX708 through the Multi Adapter, you can try streaming on the web server and see if the latency is acceptable for your needs. Just keep in mind it won’t be completely lag-free, but it should be much smoother than VNC.