Hi everyone, I’m trying to get an Arducam AR0234 working on a Jetson Nano developer kit. The system sees the camera as /dev/video0 and Cheese does open it, but the preview is just garbled trash instead of an actual frame. It’s like noise, not a usable image. I’ve attached a screenshot of what I’m seeing.
I have a feeling this is related to encoder/decoder settings, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet. Anyone run into something like this?
Thanks for the screenshot, that helps a lot. Let me confirm a few things so we’re looking at the same setup:
Also, what have you done so far to install camera support? That will help us narrow down whether this is a driver problem or a viewer/format problem.
Yes, that’s all correct. Jetson Nano dev kit, Arducam AR0234, and the driver is recognized as /dev/video0. I installed all the packages and drivers following the NVIDIA Jetson Nano getting started instructions:
After that I opened the camera in Cheese and just got the garbled image from the screenshot. So the driver seems to load fine, but the preview is still trash.
Got it. Since /dev/video0 is present, the driver side looks like it’s loading. The garbled preview in Cheese is probably a capture/pipeline mismatch rather than a driver not being installed - Cheese may be negotiating a format or decode path the camera stream doesn’t like, which is basically what you suspected with encoder/decoder settings. But I wouldn’t call that confirmed yet.
I’d suggest testing the camera with Arducam’s own preview method instead of Cheese, so we can rule out the viewer being the problem. Follow the quick start guide here, especially the install driver section:
https://docs.arducam.com/Nvidia-Jetson-Camera/Jetvariety-Camera/Quick-Start-Guide/#install-driver
Run the preview command from that guide and let us know if you get a clean frame.
Thanks, I’ll go through the Arducam quick start guide and try their preview method. Just so I’m clear: you’re saying I should set Cheese aside for now and test with the documented Arducam preview instead, right?
Right. Since /dev/video0 is already recognized, the next step is to validate the camera with Arducam’s documented preview pipeline. That tells us whether the camera stream itself is fine and the issue is specific to Cheese (or the encoder/decoder path it uses). If the Arducam preview comes out clean, then the garbled image is coming from how Cheese opens/decodes the stream, and we can look at the format it’s requesting next. If it’s still garbled with the Arducam preview, then we dig further into driver/format settings.
For now, the working approach is to use the Arducam quick start preview rather than Cheese. The encoder/decoder cause is still unconfirmed until we see the result from that test.