Hi everyone, I’m running into a frustrating issue with an ArduCam UC60 8MP camera I’m using for a booklet scanning setup. The camera is mounted on a fixed machine, and I’ve built the scanning app in React.
The problem: every time a page is turned during scanning, the autofocus kicks in and does this little zoom-in/zoom-out pulse — almost like it’s hunting — and by the time it settles, the captured frame is blurry. It’s consistent across every page turn, so the scans are basically unusable.
I’m controlling the camera through the browser via WebRTC/MediaDevices API. I’ve tried forcing the focus mode to manual via constraints but it doesn’t seem to stick — the camera still does its own thing.
Here’s a photo of the camera as it’s mounted:
Anyone dealt with similar autofocus hunting on these modules? Is there a way to lock focus programmatically or at the firmware level?
Thanks for the detailed post and the photo. That autofocus hunting you’re describing can sometimes be tied to a specific hardware revision of the module — different sensor batches or lens assemblies can behave differently when the firmware tries to pull focus.
Could you grab a picture of the back of the camera module? I want to see the PCB markings — the revision number, the chip identifiers, that sort of thing. That’ll help narrow down whether this is something we can address through a settings tweak or if there’s a known quirk with your particular hardware variant.
Unfortunately the camera is bolted down pretty tightly as part of the scanning rig and the back side is completely inaccessible without disassembling a fair bit of the machine. I’d rather not take everything apart if I can avoid it — the alignment took a while to dial in.
Is there any other way to identify the hardware revision? Maybe through USB descriptors or some firmware query? I can pull up lsusb output or anything from the device info if that helps. Really hoping there’s a programmatic fix for the focus hunting.
Completely understand not wanting to disturb the rig — realigning those setups is never fun.
The reason I was pushing for the back photo is that we’ve seen some third-party boards floating around that look identical from the front but use different sensor modules internally, and the autofocus behavior can vary quite a bit between them. So before we go down a rabbit hole with firmware tweaks, I just need to confirm what we’re actually working with.
I’ve sent you a private message — if you can reply there with the serial number from the label on your module and a link to the product listing where you purchased it, I can cross-reference that against our production records and confirm the hardware revision. Once I’ve got that confirmed, we can dive into focus control options — there may be a firmware flag or UVC extension we can use to tame the hunting.
