Hey everyone, I’m having a strange issue with my Arducam AR0234 Global Shutter camera (SKU-B0579) on a Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit. The camera works perfectly when connected to the CAM1 port — I get a clean feed, everything’s good. But when I plug the exact same camera into the CAM0 port, the feed is basically unusable. It’s not completely dead, but the image is corrupted/glitched out.
What’s weird is that my IMX219 camera works fine on BOTH ports. So the CAM0 port isn’t physically broken or anything.
This is actually expected behavior — not a bug or a driver issue. It comes down to a hardware design difference between the two CSI ports on the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit carrier board.
Here’s the key detail:
CAM1 on the Orin Nano Dev Kit is wired for a 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 connection.
CAM0 is only wired for a 2-lane connection.
The Arducam AR0234 Global Shutter camera (SKU-B0579) requires all 4 lanes to operate properly. When you connect it to CAM0, it’s only getting 2 lanes of data, which is why you see a corrupted feed — the bandwidth isn’t there.
Your IMX219 works on both ports because it’s a 2-lane camera. It doesn’t need the extra lanes, so it’s perfectly happy on either port.
Unfortunately, there is no software workaround for this. It’s a physical trace limitation on the NVIDIA carrier board itself — CAM0 simply doesn’t have the extra lane pairs routed to the connector. You’ll need to use the AR0234 exclusively on CAM1.
If you need dual camera setups, you might want to look at something like the UCTronics sync stereo global shutter bundle which is designed for this kind of use case.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the clear explanation. I was banging my head against device tree configs for hours thinking I had something misconfigured. Good to know it’s just a physical lane limitation.
I’ll keep the AR0234 on CAM1 and move forward with that.
On a related note — I have another question about this same camera. I’m looking into external triggering for my application. The AR0234 sensor datasheet mentions that the sensor chip itself supports external trigger input. Is that feature accessible on this camera module (SKU-B0579)? Or is there some limitation on the carrier board side?
If it is supported, what’s the process to configure it on the Jetson Orin Nano? I haven’t been able to find any documentation on the triggering setup for this particular module.
Good question, and you’ve already spotted the right nuance — the AR0234 sensor chip does indeed support external triggering natively. However, the limitation here is at the camera module level, not the sensor or the carrier board.
On the SKU-B0579 module, the trigger input pins from the AR0234 sensor were not routed out to any exposed header or connector on the PCB. So even though the silicon supports it, there’s physically no way to inject a trigger signal into the sensor on this particular module. Nothing you can do in software or device tree will work around that — the electrical path simply doesn’t exist.
For external hardware triggering, you’d want to look at the Onboard ISP series cameras instead. Those modules have a dedicated 3-pin connector specifically designed for external trigger and strobe sync. One option to check out is the Arducam 4K HDR High-Resolution Camera with Onboard ISP — that one has the trigger header exposed and is compatible with the Jetson Orin series.
So to summarize: sensor supports it ✓, but this specific module’s PCB doesn’t expose it ✗. It’s a module-level hardware design choice, not a Jetson platform limitation.