Intermittent behaviour with Arducam B0444 IMX462 Camera

[Dan-Judd]

I am currently testing the Arducam B0444 IMX462 Camera with Indi-Allsky. It ran fine overnight, much better low light performance than the RPI HQ camera. When the system switched to Daylight mode, it started throwing occasional frames with the wrong exposure and the image flipped horizontally.

Setup is a RPI5 with 8 gig running a fresh install of Bookworm.

Here is a screen capture of the image gallery showing the problem.

[aaronwmorris]

That is really weird. For the bright frames, are the exposures actually different?

You may try running a full system upgrade to see if that fixes the issue.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

[Dan-Judd]

The exposure value is the same .000082 for the recent good image and prior bad image. I suspect it has something to do with the 1/12000 of a second exposure. Overnight with max gain and up to 12 second exposures, there were no bad frames.

Just tried the update and upgrade and there were none. It has been less than 18 hours since I spun up the RPI5 build and did the update, upgrade, and install.

I brought the setup back inside and set it up on the bench. Exposure now is about a 1/10 of a second and much fewer weird overexposed and flipped images. At 1/12000 of a second every 3rd of 4th image was bad. At 1/10 of a second I went nearly 40 before getting a bad frame.

Not looking good for the $40 camera which is too bad because its low light performance is good. I suspect that Arducam may have a problem with their driver which is more evident the faster the shutter speed.

[aaronwmorris]

Are you using the Arducam driver? It should not be needed since the IMX462 has native support in the kernel.

[Dan-Judd]

Yes I followed the install as shown at:
https://docs.arducam.com/Raspberry-Pi-Camera/Pivariety-Camera/Quick-Start-Guide/
In short, Indi-Allsky can talk to the camera with the Pivariety drivers installed, but can't without them.

I started over and did a fresh Bookworm install, Indi compile, and Indi-Allsky install. No Arducam drivers this time. On the webpage it shows that Libcamera_imx462 is camera available. Now Indi-Allsky can't talk to the Arducam B0444 IMX462 camera. The log shows these errors with each image capture attempt:

2025-01-01T22:55:18.659125-07:00 raspberrypi [ERROR] Capture-1-43370/MainThread libcamera._processMetadata() [436]: libcamera sensor black level key not found
2025-01-01T22:55:18.659101-07:00 raspberrypi [ERROR] Capture-1-43370/MainThread libcamera._processMetadata() [357]: libcamera camera temperature key not found
2025-01-01T22:55:18.659065-07:00 raspberrypi [ERROR] Capture-1-43370/MainThread libcamera._processMetadata() [334]: Metadata file not found: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/tmp04vgixtw.json'
2025-01-01T22:55:18.659029-07:00 raspberrypi [ERROR] Capture-1-43370/MainThread libcamera.getCcdExposureStatus() [314]: libcamera-still error: b'ERROR: *** no cameras available ***\n'
2025-01-01T22:55:18.658932-07:00 raspberrypi [ERROR] Capture-1-43370/MainThread libcamera.getCcdExposureStatus() [314]: libcamera-still error: b'[2:12:50.192807520] [43430] \x1b[1;32m INFO \x1b[1;37mCamera \x1b[1;34mcamera_manager.cpp:325 \x1b[0mlibcamera v0.3.2+99-1230f78d\n'

[aaronwmorris]

Auto-detection of the camera will not work (for the kernel), but you do have to manually load the overlay for the IMX462.

https://github.com/aaronwmorris/indi-allsky/wiki/libcamera-enablement#imx462

[Dan-Judd]

I added to /boot/firmware/config.txt

dtoverlay=imx462,clock-frequency=74250000

saved and rebooted.
Still get the dreaded *** no cameras available ***

The only way I have been able to get the Arducam camera to be detected is to install their driver and add this line to config.txt:
dtoverlay=arducam-pivariety

[Dan-Judd]

innomaker makes an IMX462 camera that I am using instead of the Arducam. $33 on Amazon. It works via native support. All I had to do to get it working was to plug it in and add, dtoverlay=imx462,clock-frequency=74250000, to the config.txt file.

The bad news is that the innomaker IMX462 suffers from banding and flickering issues due to voltage regulation problems.