Having a critical issue with an AR0234 camera on a Jetson Orin Nano. The camera is detected during boot but immediately goes into a “no power” state. Here are my environment details:
Sensor ID: 0x0A56
Firmware: 0x10004
Driver: arducam-csi2
Linux kernel: 5.15.148-tegra
Device Tree Overlay: tegra234-p3767-camera-p3768-arducam-dual.dtbo
Symptoms I’m seeing:
v4l2-ctl reports: Camera 2: no power
Sensor registers return 0xFFFE (looks like NACK / no response at all)
GStreamer capture gives me solid green frames, which I understand is the Tegra VI “no input” pattern
My suspicion is that the reset GPIO or power regulator isn’t being maintained after the probe sequence completes. The sensor probes fine initially but then the power rail seems to drop.
Could anyone point me to:
How to check and manually control the camera reset GPIO state on the Orin Nano?
Steps to verify the camera power supply is stable?
Any power sequencing or initialization commands I should be running manually?
Let’s start with a basic sanity check. Can you try this repository and see if you can get anything at all out of the camera?
It has some test scripts for streaming and recording on Jetvariety modules. Run through the scripts there and let me know what you get. Even if the output isn’t perfect, it’ll help narrow down whether this is a driver-level power issue or something else.
Alright, I went through all the test scripts in the ArducamUVCPythonDemo repository. Unfortunately every single script produces a completely black frame — not green this time, just solid black.
This still feels like the same root issue I reported earlier. The sensor registers returning 0xFFFE tells me the chip isn’t actually responding over I2C, so no amount of software tweaking is going to produce valid frames. The black frame vs green frame difference is interesting but I think both point to the sensor being unpowered or held in reset.
A couple of other questions while I’m stuck here:
Are there known incompatibilities with Jetson Linux 36.4.7 on the Orin Nano? I’ve seen mentions that newer Jetpack releases broke some camera pipelines.
What specific version of Jetson Linux is actually recommended for Jetvariety and Arducam cameras, particularly IMX 519 and IMX 477? I have those sensors as well and want to make sure I’m not fighting a platform version issue on top of the hardware problem.
Before we go deeper into version compatibility — can you clarify which camera port you’re using? Cam 0 or Cam 1? This matters because the power rail and reset GPIO assignments differ between the two ports on the Orin Nano.
Also, could you share some pictures of the hardware connection? I want to rule out any physical setup issues — ribbon cable orientation, seating, whether you’re using any adapters or extension cables, that kind of thing.
One other thing to note: on the latest Jetpack release, ximagesink is no longer supported, so if any of your GStreamer pipelines are using that for display, they’ll fail. That might not be your main problem right now but it’s something to keep in mind when you get past the power issue.
Let’s rule out the port assignment and physical connection first, then we’ll dig into the reset GPIO and power sequencing.