Hey, having a weird problem with an Arducam camera module on my Raspberry Pi. It’s the 1080P one (I think it’s the ov5647 sensor). It worked fine on my Pi 4B for about a day, and then it just quit working. The Pi itself is totally fine — it can recognize other cameras I plug into it, but this one stopped responding. I’ve rebooted the Pi and reseated the camera connector multiple times, no luck. It just doesn’t come up anymore. Anyone know what might be going on?
Happy to help. Before we dig in, can you generate a bug report so I can see your system and camera state? Please reboot the device first, then run these commands:
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
This will output an arducam-bug-report.txt in the current directory. Attach that file here for me.
Okay, ran it. Attached the arducam-bug-report.txt. Let me know what you spot.
Thanks, I went through the report. I can see dtoverlay=imx219 set in your config. That’s the problem — the auto-detect is pointing at the imx219 sensor, but your module is actually an ov5647. The overlay has to match the real sensor. Try this:
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
# find the line dtoverlay=imx219 and comment it out
Press ctrl+x, then y, then reboot. After it comes back up, run ls /dev/video* to check if you get video0. If dev0 shows up, try libcamera-still -t 0 to preview the image.
So I deleted the dtoverlay=imx219 line from config.txt and rebooted, but the camera still doesn’t work. Pretty much the same error as before. Here’s a screenshot of what I get now. [attached image_52803878221671442827682.png]
Looking at that debug output, it looks like the hardware connection is unstable — the errors are coming from the i2c bus not responding reliably. That usually points to the cable between the camera and the Pi. Can you try using a different / extra ribbon cable to stabilize the connection and see if that changes anything?
I replaced the cable from the camera to the Raspberry Pi with a different one, but it’s still not working. Same problem as before. [attached CatchF76D.jpg]
OK, so just deleting the line didn’t fix it. You actually need to set the correct overlay instead of removing it entirely. Change dtoverlay=imx219 to dtoverlay=ov5647 in the config.txt, then reboot your Pi for it to take effect. Once it starts up, run libcamera-still -t 0 and check whether it’s working.
Quick question before I do that — earlier I just deleted the imx219 line entirely. Do I need to add a brand new line for ov5647 instead? And I noticed there’s some camera_auto_detect setting floating around, is that relevant here?
Right — you need to add the dtoverlay=ov5647 line in config.txt, since the physical overlay has to match the sensor. Also please check whether camera_auto_detect=0 exists in your config.txt file.
So to summarize the current state: after changing the overlay didn’t get picked up (because the line was deleted rather than changed to ov5647) and swapping the cable didn’t help, the next step is to explicitly add dtoverlay=ov5647, confirm the camera_auto_detect=0 setting, reboot, and test again with libcamera-still -t 0. If it’s still failing after that, send me a fresh bug report and we’ll keep digging.