Installing V4L2 driver and opening focus/zoom window for Arducam 64MP on Raspberry Pi 4

Raspberry Pi Cameras
1

Hi everyone. I’m trying to get focus and zoom control working on my Arducam 64MP Ultra High Resolution Autofocus camera. I found a YouTube video (https://youtu.be/FZmmjNnrrbo) where they install and activate the V4L2 driver for the Arducam Controller, then open a window called “Arducam-Pivariety-V4L2-Driver/focus” to control focus and zoom. I’ve been trying to do the same thing, but I’m stuck getting that V4L2 driver (the video calls it VL42) installed and activated. My setup is a Raspberry Pi 4 and I’m currently using libcamera. Any pointers would be great.

2

Thanks for the details. Just so you know, Arducam has dropped support for that old V4L2 driver code shown in the video, so the “Arducam-Pivariety-V4L2-Driver/focus” window approach isn’t the recommended path anymore. Instead, you’ll want to control focus and zoom directly with the libcamera command. The guide is here: libcamera and rpicam-apps - Arducam Wiki

One other thing worth mentioning: the 64MP camera uses a CSI interface, so it only works on a Raspberry Pi — not on a Windows/PC setup. If you ever want to control the Pi camera from an Android phone, this guide covers it: 64MP Hawkeye - Arducam Wiki

Give the libcamera method a try and let us know how it goes.

3

I tried the recommended method — pressing keys to control focus and zoom — but nothing changes in the image at all. I also can’t find anything about zoom on the website. Am I missing something?

4

From what you’re describing, my guess is that libcamera either isn’t installed, or you don’t have the Arducam version of libcamera installed. The focus/zoom key controls won’t do anything on a stock/vanilla libcamera build. Please follow the installation guide to install libcamera from Arducam. Also, could you clarify what you mean by “zoom”? I want to make sure we’re talking about the same feature.

5

I do have libcamera installed and I’ve been using it already. My confusion is specifically about zoom — I was using the Arducam team’s YouTube video as a reference for what “zoom” should do. That part is still unclear to me.

6

Got it. To verify exactly which libcamera packages are installed, could you run this command and paste the output back here?

dpkg -l | grep libcamera

That will show us whether the Arducam libcamera is actually present on your system.

7

Sorry, my previous reply seems to have gone through blank. Here’s the output of that command — I’ve attached it as a screenshot because the terminal formatting got a bit messy.

8

Thanks, that’s helpful. From your screenshot I can confirm the Arducam libcamera version is installed — that’s the build the script in the video needs. The script itself lives in the Arducam-Pivariety-V4L2-Driver repo under the tools folder: Arducam-Pivariety-V4L2-Driver/tools at master · ArduCAM/Arducam-Pivariety-V4L2-Driver · GitHub

To reproduce the zoom effect from the video, you’ll want two terminal windows:

  1. In the first terminal, start a preview with:
    libcamera-still -t 0

  2. In the second terminal, run the zoom-control script from that tools link above.

I can’t guarantee it’ll work on your setup, but give it a try and let me know what you see.