Troubleshooting Pi Camera

[GMW1988]

In the past the camera was working. However, today I connected the Pi Camera and I noticed the led light does not flash on when the Cubesatsim is turned on. I set it to the 4th blink to SSTV mode. On the Ground-station I tried the SSTV and I was not able to get images sent from the camera. A signal is coming through to the Ground-station but it also says Host Not found.

I rechecked my connections for the camera. I reinstalled the Pi Zero software. I tried another new Pi Camera and I am getting the same results. Any troubleshooting ideas that I could try.

[GMW1988]

Problem fixed!! Cable was not plugged in properly. I replugged it in and now it is working.

[alanbjohnston]

Yep, that’s what it usually is.

Some of the Pi Cameras I buy have an LED but it doesn’t illuminate - I don’t know why.

You can always test the camera by typing this:

raspistill -o camera_out.jpg

If it doesn’t give an error and

ls camera_out.jog

Lists a file of several kilobytes, then the camera is working.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

wanted to add some more about cameras.
I ran into issues with newer, IMX219 based sensors. They don't seem to work with bullseye - or I couldn't figure out how to make them work.
OV5647 based cameras seem to work ok but are harder to find.

Tried upgrading the OS to newer variants (buster and trixie) - IMX219 based cameras work but there's a problem with GPIO27 being reserved for HAT detection.

@alanbjohnston is there a specific reason for GPIO27 other than the transmit LED? there's another pin next to it that doesn't seem to be used according the schematic. (GPIO18) Moving this over for a future release might be a good idea to avoid this issue.

Thanks
Marcel

[ve3ukw]

sorry - meant bookwork (debian 12) and trixie (debian 13)

[alanbjohnston]

Hi Marcel,

There’s nothing special about that GPIO pin. It could be moved.

I haven’t come across this issue as I haven’t looked at updating the OS version yet. But others are - there is another thread here on doing that - maybe you can help that effort.

Alan

[alanbjohnston]

I just found this https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=274521

which talks about adding force_eeprom_read=0 to config.txt to skip the hat eeprom read if that is what is causing the problem.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

I tried force_eeprom_read=0 - didn't solve the issue. The only other option I found was to mask the Pin but that might render it useless.
Moving TX LED to Pin 11 of the GPIO header is probably the best bet. Will take a look at an empty board to see if I can patch this.

The other limitation is memory - 512MB are getting very tight. Building libcamera is a challenge.
I'll hop on the other thread to see what can be done.