Night Vision Camera, not detected?

Support
1

Hi,

Just got the Pimoroni 160deg Night Vision Camera,
Connected it to Raspberry 3, and powered up.
There is a red LED on the camera board indicating it has power.
I enabled camera in raspi-config, and rebooted.
Still no evidence of camera detected in dmesg.
raspistill finds no camera.

Any clues how to troubleshoot?

Regards
Jonas

2

Double check you have it in the CSI and not the DSI connector.
I was also going to say make sure you don’t have the ribbon cable backwards but you wouldn’t get the red LED lit if you had done that.

3

Thanks, that might actually be the problem! (wrong connector)

4

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hurt anything, it just won’t work. The DSI is the one right on the edge of the board, the CSI is back by the Ethernet and USB jacks. On a Pi 3 of 4 etc.
If it’s a PI Zero there is only the one mini CSI jack.

5

Update, no that was not the problem, it is plugged into the right connector.
Is there any way to verify camera is connected, like anything to look for i dmesg etc?
(in order to find out if it is a HW of SW issue)

Cheers,
Jonas

6

That I don’t know, my Linux skills are noob level at best.

7

Found this

vcgencmd get_camera

will confirm whether the GPU has seen the sensor or not.

supported=1 detected=1

If detected is 0, then the GPU can’t see it.

8

type this into the command prompt , it will take a pic if the camera is connected ,
raspistill -o cam.jpg

this is where I go for camera info ’
9

Thanks for suggestions. raspistill just hangs…

pi@octopi : ~ $ vcgencmd get_camera
supported=1 detected=1

pi@octopi : ~ $ raspistill -o test.jpg

10

Try running this from thonny or a python ide of your choice.

from picamera import PiCamera
from time import sleep

camera = PiCamera()
camera.rotation = 180
camera.resolution = (1280, 720)

camera.start_preview()
sleep(10)
camera.stop_preview()
11

Thanks for suggestion, however also python hangs after this:
#pi@octopi : ~ $ python3.7
#Python 3.7.3 (default, Apr 3 2019, 05:39:12)
#[GCC 8.2.0] on linux
#Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
#>>> from picamera import PiCamera
#>>> from time import sleep
#>>>
#>>> camera = PiCamera()

Then just hangs, even CTRL+C does not work

12

Running it in an IDE it hangs?

13

This is a headless Rpi, I have no IDE. I used python3 command to run your script interactively.

Basically it seems that if I run anything that tries to access the camera then it hangs to the degree that pressing CTRL+C just makes a ^C appear on the console. Same for running this python script at the python3 prompt as well as running raspistill in shell.

Cheers
Jonas

14

Ok, I’m with you now. I don’t know what’s going wrong though. I’m thinking its the camera? If you have an HDMI cable a TV can be used as a monitor. Then install PiOS with desktop, just for testing. I install it anyway even on my headless setups. I just switch it to boot to command line once I’m done setting everything up.