Hi all, I’m trying to get an Arducam Camarray HAT with an OV9281 working on my Raspberry Pi and the Pi just won’t see the camera. During setup, when I run the compile script it fails with an error saying there’s no /dev/video0 device. I checked and /dev/video0 definitely doesn’t exist. Has anyone run into this before?
Let’s start with the basics. Can you double-check the physical connections? Ribbon cable orientation, the HAT fully seated on the GPIO header, and the camera connector locked in place. A lot of ‘no camera’ issues end up being a loose or reversed cable.
I went through all the physical connections again. Everything looks correct to me — the cables are seated and the HAT is on properly.
Let’s get some kernel logs to see what’s happening when it tries to probe. Can you run this and paste the output?
dmesg | grep -E "imx477|imx219|arducam"
Here’s what I get:
[ 0.046392] platform 3f801000.csi: Fixed dependency cycle(s) with /soc/i2c0mux/i2c@1/arducam_pivariety@c
[ 10.849921] arducam-pivariety 10-000c: pivariety_read: Reading register 0x103 failed
[ 10.849976] arducam-pivariety 10-000c: probe failed
That probe failure is the key clue. To narrow it down, can you also share your environment details? Please post:
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release
cat /proc/meminfo
And the relevant section of /boot/config.txt.
Sure, here’s everything:
uname -a:
Linux labDashboardHall 6.1.21-v7+ #1642 SMP Mon Apr 3 17:20:52 BST 2023 armv7l GNU/Linux
/etc/os-release:
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
/proc/meminfo:
MemTotal: 891696 kB
MemFree: 133680 kB
MemAvailable: 420712 kB
Buffers: 5212 kB
Cached: 374452 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 183736 kB
Inactive: 498332 kB
Active(anon): 12388 kB
Inactive(anon): 346620 kB
Active(file): 171348 kB
Inactive(file): 151712 kB
Unevictable: 16 kB
Mlocked: 16 kB
SwapTotal: 102396 kB
SwapFree: 99836 kB
Zswap: 0 kB
Zswapped: 0 kB
Dirty: 3292 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 302616 kB
Mapped: 310184 kB
Shmem: 56604 kB
KReclaimable: 18056 kB
Slab: 37912 kB
SReclaimable: 18056 kB
SUnreclaim: 19856 kB
KernelStack: 2784 kB
PageTables: 10300 kB
SecPageTables: 0 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 548244 kB
Committed_AS: 2580620 kB
VmallocTotal: 1163264 kB
VmallocUsed: 8152 kB
VmallocChunk: 0 kB
Percpu: 464 kB
CmaTotal: 65536 kB
CmaFree: 26796 kB
/boot/config.txt (relevant part):
dtparam=audio=on
start_x=1
display_auto_detect=1
#dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
max_framebuffers=2
disable_overscan=1
[pi4]
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
arm_boost=1
[all]
gpu_mem=128
camera_auto_detect=0
dtoverlay=arducam-pivariety,media-controller=0
Thanks for the logs. From the dmesg output, the arducam-pivariety driver is failing to probe — “Reading register 0x103 failed” means the sensor isn’t responding on I2C at all, which is why /dev/video0 never shows up. Your config.txt looks reasonable to me (camera_auto_detect=0 with the pivariety overlay), so this is pointing more toward the hardware side than a software config issue.
Could you also take a look at this thread, which describes a similar problem? Raspberry pi "no camera" Arducam CamArray HAT OV9281 - #2 by Edward
And it would help if you could post pictures of your hardware connections — both the camera end and the Raspberry Pi end, plus the power supply.
I went back through the earlier steps and also tried libcamera-still -t 5000. Here’s the output:
Preview window unavailable
[0:10:26.316236521] [2052] INFO Camera camera_manager.cpp:299 libcamera v0.0.4+22-923f5d70
ERROR: *** no cameras available ***
I’ve attached pictures of the connections (camera end and Pi end) and the power supply.
Looking at the pictures, I can see two problems: the wires are connected incorrectly, and you’re following the wrong documentation. The “no cameras available” error from libcamera-still just confirms the camera isn’t being detected at all.
Ah okay, that would explain a lot — I was going off the Camarray HAT / OV9281 setup. For the wiring, I’ll redo it. Is there a proper guide I should be following for this camera?
Yes — for this TOF camera you need the Raspberry Pi guide here: Getting Started: Arducam ToF Camera for Raspberry Pi - Arducam Wiki
To sum up: the root cause was incorrect wiring combined with using the wrong documentation. Fix the wiring first, then follow the steps in that guide and the camera should probe correctly.