Hi all, I’m planning a project using an Arducam camera sensor (either an IMX-477 or IMX-283) on a Raspberry Pi 5, and possibly a Compute Module 4 or 5 down the line. I need to run it over a 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 interface. I’ve been getting conflicting explanations from another distributor about whether this can even be done on these boards. Does anyone have an example of operating a camera sensor over 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 on the Pi 5 or CM4/5? And do I need some kind of adapter or special driver software for that?
Thanks for reaching out. Before I dig into the 4-lane part, could you confirm a couple of things? Which exact Arducam module are you using, which board are you testing on first (Pi 5 or CM4/5), and what OS/kernel version are you on? If you’ve already tried anything, do you have any logs or error messages from the attempt?
Right now I haven’t actually run anything yet, so I don’t have logs or errors to share. I’m still in the planning stage. The sensors I’m looking at are the IMX-477 or IMX-283 based Arducam modules, and the first target would be a Raspberry Pi 5 on the current Raspberry Pi OS. The CM4/5 would come later once the prototype works.
Got it, that helps. So on the 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 question specifically: as things stand, Raspberry Pi has not released a 4-lane MIPI camera driver. The standard camera stack on these boards currently operates the CSI-2 interface in 2-lane mode, so we don’t have a working example of 4-lane operation on the Pi 5 or CM4/5 that we can point you to.
Understood. Just to be clear, does that mean even if I use an adapter or a different camera module wiring, 4-lane mode still won’t work? I was hoping there was a driver flag or device tree setting I was missing.
Unfortunately yes, it’s not something you can enable with an adapter or a device tree tweak right now. The limitation is on the driver side: without Raspberry Pi releasing a 4-lane MIPI camera driver, the hardware may support it but the software stack doesn’t expose a supported 4-lane path. So we’re unable to provide help or a reference example for 4-lane CSI-2 operation on the Pi 5 or CM4/5 at this time.
That’s disappointing, but thanks for the straight answer. So am I stuck waiting on Raspberry Pi to publish that driver before this is feasible?
Correct. The key dependency here is Raspberry Pi releasing a 4-lane MIPI camera driver. Until that becomes available, we can’t assist with 4-lane CSI-2 operation on the Raspberry Pi 5 or Compute Module 4/5, and there’s no supported example we can provide. Once that driver is released, this use case would be worth revisiting.