Hi all, I’m stuck with an Arducam Pi 5MP OV5647 camera on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. It’s never worked since day one. When the Pi powers on, the camera’s red LED flashes once, and that’s the only sign of life. After that, nothing - no image, no error, nothing.
Welcome to the forum. Just to confirm - is the LED a single quick flash at startup and then it stays off? Also, do you have any other camera module you can test on the same Pi to rule out the board or cable?
Yeah, exactly - one quick flash when it boots, then it stays off. I tested a Pi Cam v2 on the same Pi with the same cable and it works fine, so the Pi side and the camera connector seem okay. It’s something specific to this Arducam. I’ve been following the Arducam YouTube setup video step by step too, but no luck. The thing has literally never worked.
Thanks, that’s helpful. The v2 working rules out a lot of board-level problems. The LED flashing at startup on the Arducam tells us the module is getting power and starting to initialize, but it’s failing to complete initialization or start streaming. The likely culprits are the module itself, the ribbon connection/seating, or the device tree/driver configuration. I’d like to see a bug report from your system to dig into the config. After a reboot, run these:
wget -O arducam-camera-bug-report https://github.com/ketai-dhr/arducam-camera-bug-report/releases/download/tools/arducam-camera-bug-report
chmod +x ./arducam-camera-bug-report
./arducam-camera-bug-report
That will create an arducam-bug-report.txt in your current directory.
Okay, I ran those three commands and it generated the arducam-bug-report.txt file. I’ve sent the file over to you in a private message since it contains my system details.
Received it, thanks. The report captures the camera and system configuration we need. I’m going through it now - given the LED behavior and the working v2, we’re focusing on whether the Arducam module is being detected correctly and how the dtoverlay/driver is set up.
Quick update - I went back through the whole setup again this morning and the camera actually started working. I’m not 100% sure which step finally cleared it up, but it’s streaming now.
Glad it’s sorted! For anyone who lands here later with the same symptom: that single red LED flash at startup means the module is getting power and beginning to initialize, so if it stops there, check your ribbon cable seating and the camera/dtoverlay configuration, and generate the bug report with the commands above if you’re still stuck. Since the Pi Cam v2 worked on the same setup, the Pi itself was never the problem. Thanks for the update!