Port 8081 not listening on PiVistation 5 after quick start guide

Raspberry Pi Cameras
1

Hi everyone, I’m trying to set up my new Arducam PiVistation 5 with the AI Camera module, following the quick start guide here: Pivistation 5 Series - Arducam Wiki

I’m stuck at the point where I’m supposed to access the web interface. The docs say it should be available on port 8081, but nothing loads when I try. My Pi is connected via ethernet — eth0 has IP 192.168.10.82 with netmask 255.255.255.0. I’m running as pi@raspberrypi.

Anyone else run into this? Am I missing a step?

2

Welcome! Let’s troubleshoot this step by step. First, can you confirm that the PiVistation software is actually running on the Pi? Also, could you run a couple of quick checks for me:

  1. Run ifconfig (or ip addr) and share the output so we can confirm the network interface is up.
  2. Can you post a screenshot of what you see in the browser when you try to access the interface?

That’ll help narrow things down.

3

Here’s the ifconfig output — looks like the interface is up and has the right IP:

eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.10.82  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.10.255

And here’s a screenshot of what I see when I try to connect:

Screenshot 2025-06-06 at 14.13.49.png

Just a blank page / connection refused basically. Doesn’t seem like anything is listening there.

4

I took a close look at your screenshot — and I think I spotted the issue. Your browser’s address bar is showing port 8080, not 8081. That’s a different port entirely, so that would explain the connection being refused.

That said, before we call it solved, let’s also verify that the PiVistation web service is actually listening on 8081. Can you run this on your Pi and share the output?

netstat -ln

This will show us all listening ports. If 8081 isn’t in the list, the service may not have started at all.

5

Oh man, you’re right — I had 8080 in the browser the whole time. Totally missed that. So I tried again with port 8081 and… still nothing. Connection refused again.

Here’s the netstat output:

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address            Foreign Address          State
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22               0.0.0.0:*                LISTEN
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:631            0.0.0.0:*                LISTEN
tcp6       0      0 ::1:631                  :::*                     LISTEN
tcp6       0      0 :::22                    :::*                     LISTEN
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5353             0.0.0.0:*
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:52811            0.0.0.0:*
udp6       0      0 :::47547                 :::*
udp6       0      0 :::5353                  :::*
raw6       0      0 :::58                    :::*                     7

I can see SSH on 22 and CUPS on 631, but port 8081 is nowhere in the list. So it’s not just the wrong port — the service isn’t running at all.

6

Yep, that confirms it. Two problems uncovered:

  1. You were using port 8080 instead of 8081 in the browser (easy to mix up).
  2. Even on the correct port, the PiVistation web/streaming service isn’t running — port 8081 isn’t bound to anything.

So the service likely failed to auto-start or hasn’t been launched yet. You’ll need to manually start the PiVistation streaming service on the Raspberry Pi. The exact command depends on how it was installed, but typically it’s either a systemd service or a script. Try:

sudo systemctl status arducam-pivistation

or check if there’s a start script in the PiVistation directory. If you find the service name, you can enable and start it with:

sudo systemctl enable --now <service-name>

Once it’s running, netstat -ln should show 0.0.0.0:8081 in the LISTEN state, and you should be able to reach it at http://192.168.10.82:8081. Let us know what you find!