Hey everyone, I’m trying to get an Arducam 5MP camera module (the OV5647) working with my Raspberry Pi 4B. I’ve connected it using the included FFC ribbon cable — made sure the contacts are facing the right way and everything. But when I go into raspi-config to enable the camera, the option just isn’t there. I’ve looked under Interface Options and Advanced Options and there’s no camera enable setting anywhere. Has anyone run into this? Is there something obvious I’m missing?
That’s a common stumbling block. A couple of things to check first: which version of Raspberry Pi OS are you running? You can check with cat /etc/os-release or lsb_release -a. Also, could you share screenshots of what you’re seeing in both the Interface Options and Advanced Options menus in raspi-config? Sometimes the camera option moves around depending on the OS release.
Sure, here’s what I’m seeing. First screenshot is the Interface Options menu — no camera listed there at all:
And here’s the Advanced Options menu — also nothing camera-related:
And just to show I’m not crazy, here’s the full raspi-config main screen:
I haven’t checked the OS version yet — will do that now. But yeah, the camera option is just completely absent.
Thanks for the screenshots, that’s really helpful. So what you’re seeing is actually expected behavior on newer Raspberry Pi OS releases (Bookworm and later). The traditional camera enable toggle in raspi-config has been removed because the camera stack was overhauled — it moved from the legacy Broadcom camera system to libcamera. The system doesn’t show the option because it’s no longer the correct way to enable the camera on these newer builds.
For the Arducam OV5647 specifically, I’d recommend following their official getting-started guide here:
https://docs.arducam.com/Raspberry-Pi-Camera/Native-camera/5MP-OV5647/#getting-started
That guide walks through the device-specific and OS-version-aware steps. On newer Pi OS versions, you typically don’t need to ‘enable’ the camera in raspi-config at all — you just need to make sure the appropriate dtoverlay is in your /boot/firmware/config.txt and that libcamera is properly installed. The Arducam docs cover the exact config.txt entry needed for the OV5647. Give that a shot and let us know how it goes!
Ahh, that makes a lot of sense now. I didn’t realize the camera stack had changed so much in newer releases. I’ll go through the Arducam guide you linked and check my /boot/firmware/config.txt for the right dtoverlay. Will report back once I’ve tried it out — thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
No problem! A quick heads-up while you’re at it — after making any changes to config.txt, make sure to reboot, and then test with libcamera-hello (or libcamera-still for a still image) rather than the older raspistill command. If the camera is detected properly, you should get a live preview or a captured frame. If it still doesn’t show up, double-check the FFC cable orientation at both ends — the silver contacts on the ribbon should face the contacts on the board connectors. That’s caught me out more than once.