Software Guide | Camera solutions for Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Jetson Nano. Camera modules and lenses.

Introduction

This page describle the basic control over the sensor registers using Arducam camera breakout board, it might not be able to cover all the detail register operations, but give you an insight how to adjust these settings.

Sensor I2C Slave Address

The OV9281 camera I2C 8-bit slave address is fixed to 0xC0. With 16bit regsiter address, and 8bit register value.

There is two product ID register (0x300A and 0x300B) which can help diagnose if the I2C bus is accessable and determine the camera models.

Product ID Register	Value
0x300A	0x92
0x300B	0x81

Sensor Initialization

You need a basic settings to bring up the sensor and make it working in normal streaming mode. Here is the sample config for the Window GUI.

Camera	Sample Config
OV9281_1280x800_MIPI_RAW10 (Monochrome)	OV9281_MIPI_1L_RAW10.cfg

Manual Exposure Control

We only change the these registers to demonstrate how manual exposure works.

Register	Bit	Description
0x3500	3:0	Bit[3:0]:Exposure[15:12]
0x3501	7:0	Exposure[11:4] Minimum exposure time is 1 row period. Maximum exposure time is frame length – 20 row periods, where frame length is set by registers {0x380E,0x380F}.
0x3502	7:4	Exposure[3:0] Minimum exposure time is 1 row period. Maximum exposure time is frame length – 20 row periods, where frame length is set by registers {0x380E,0x380F}.

Here we demonstrate how to change the Exposure through the register (0x3501).

RegAddr = 0x3501, Value = 0x06

RegAddr = 0x3501, Value = 0x16

RegAddr = 0x3501, Value = 0x31

Manual Gain Control

Gain settings are like the ISO settings in most digital cameras. The gain is divided into analog and digital gain, and there are separate gain settings for four color-specific gains. There is also global gain setting to change all the four color-specific gains.

Here we demonstrate how to change the gain through the LONG_Gain register (0x3508/0x3509).