Hey everyone, hoping someone can help me out here. I’ve got two issues with my camera kit.
The first is physical — the front face doesn’t sit flush at all and won’t stay fully attached. When I look closely, the clips on the front face seem to be hitting the camera sensor mounting, like they’re interfering with it. I’ve posted some photos so you can see what I mean.
The bigger problem: the camera server keeps dying on me. Sometimes it runs for 10 minutes, sometimes close to an hour, but it never survives longer than that. The whole device basically stops working as advertised once the server goes down. Really frustrating.
That does sound frustrating. Before diving into the server issue — can you tell me a bit about your software setup? Which image are you running, and have you done any system updates?
I’m using the Arducam Raspberry Pi image straight from their website. No updates applied at all — the Arducam instructions specifically say not to run updates, so I’ve been following that to the letter.
Okay, good to know. When the crash happens, what exactly do you see? Is the whole Pi locking up, or is it just the stream that becomes unreachable? And does it seem related to what the camera is doing at the time, or does it happen even when idling?
When it’s working, the live video feed is totally fine — no stuttering or anything. Then after a while the server address just stops responding in the browser completely. I haven’t tried plugging into the HDMI out on the Pi when it dies to see if the whole system is frozen or if it’s just the server process. That’s on my list to check next but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
Yeah I tried a few different resolutions hoping that might help but it didn’t make any real difference — still crashes eventually regardless. Haven’t done the HDMI isolation test yet though.
I think I can explain what’s happening here. The kit shipped with an earlier software image, and the stream server in that version has some pretty significant inefficiencies. Over time it consumes more and more CPU until it eventually hangs or crashes entirely. That matches the pattern you’re describing — variable uptime but never making it past an hour or so. The Arducam instruction not to update unfortunately kept you on that older, less stable build.
Good news is there’s a new software image available that includes major optimizations for the stream server. It brings CPU consumption way down and should give you stable long-term operation.
Regarding the front face not sitting flush — do those clips look like they’re deformed in any way, or is it more of an alignment issue? That might need to be addressed separately.
Thanks for the detailed response, that actually makes a lot of sense — the CPU slowly getting crushed over time would explain why the uptime varies but always eventually dies. I’ll grab that new image and flash it today. On the front face, the clips don’t look deformed exactly, they just seem like they’re positioned in a way that they bump into the sensor housing. I’ll report back once I’ve got the new image running.