Hi all, I’m trying to get the Arducam long cable Ethernet extension kit working on my Raspberry Pi 5 with the v1/v2/v3 camera modules. I’ve got the hardware set up but I’m stuck — do I need a specific kernel version driver for this to work? I can’t seem to find which kernel module handles the LAN extension for these cameras. I’ve attached a photo of my current setup.
Anyone know which driver I need to install? I’ve been searching but haven’t found anything clear for the Pi 5.
Thanks for the photo — that helps confirm what you’re working with. Just to clarify, you’re using the Arducam Ethernet LAN cable extension kit with a Pi 5, and you’re trying to use the official Raspberry Pi camera modules (v1, v2, or v3) over that extension, correct?
Before we dig into drivers — can you describe what’s happening when you try to use the camera currently? Are you getting any specific error messages, or is it just not detected at all? Also, what OS/kernel version are you running on the Pi 5? (uname -r output would be useful.)
Yeah, that’s exactly the setup — RPi 5 with the Arducam Ethernet LAN extension kit, and I’m using a v2 camera module. To be honest, I haven’t actually tried running it yet because I assumed I’d need to compile or install a separate kernel driver for the extension kit to handle the camera data over Ethernet. I spent a while looking through the Arducam GitHub repos and forum posts and got the impression there was some kind of kernel-level driver I was missing. I didn’t want to just plug everything in and potentially mess something up without the right driver in place.
Running uname -r gives me: 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-2712
That’s a totally fair assumption — a lot of camera extension solutions do require their own kernel modules, so I can see why you’d think that. But here’s the good news: the Arducam Ethernet Extension Kit for v1/v2/v3 cameras doesn’t need any additional kernel drivers at all. It works transparently with the existing kernel support that’s already in Raspberry Pi OS.
Under the hood, the extension kit handles the MIPI CSI signal transport over Ethernet in hardware — so from the kernel’s perspective, it still just sees a standard camera module on the CSI interface. There’s no special kernel module to load or compile.
You should be able to just connect everything, enable the camera interface (sudo raspi-config → Interface Options → Camera), and it’ll work the same way a directly-attached v2 camera would. The official quick start guide walks through the setup: Ethernet Extension Kit - Arducam Wiki
Your kernel version 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-2712 is totally fine — the standard libcamera stack and the legacy camera stack both work with this extension kit without any kernel modifications. Give it a try and let us know how it goes!