I recently bought the B0179 Arducam IMX219 Wide Angle Camera from one of the recommended sellers.
When testing it the image was blurry even when I tried to refocus the lens manually. But also the image had noticeable spots which looked like dirt or scratches. The front of the lens seems okay and the back also appears fine with no dust or scratches. So internally there seems to be defects.
I tried putting a drone FPV camera lens of mine on it instead and the image looks far better, aside from some color distortion (likely not a perfect lens match). So now I am searching for other possible lens, does anyone have suggestions? Currently I do not trust the lens by Arducam.
Can you please sent us some sample pictures of the pictures with low quality? Also please let me know where did you get this camera module, and I will help you negotiate with them for a replacement if necessary.
@core260, I feel sorry but I just saw the picture and video from the email.
So I’ve got to admit that there are some noticeable spots on the lens, but actually they are the results of bubbles getting in when forging the glass, but that is expected for entry-level lenses, and they will disappear when the picture is in focus.
Speaking of the picture quality, can you show us the link to the FPV lens you are having? If those lenses provide a better picture quality with the same field of view, we would really be considering finding and buying those lenses. Usually lenses with a narrower view will result in better details, and this one is an entry-level wide angle, so it might be insufficient for some stricter requirements.
My issue with the lens is not really solved, it seems that the lens is a cost effective item and may have defects.
Arducam support has been very helpful answering questions though. They have helped me find a product that fits my needs better. I will likely order other parts and know if I have a solution in 4-6 weeks (shipping).
I bought and received a new camera (AR0230), after I have spent two weeks trying to get it to work with the help of ArduCam staff. It is still not working. Loosing faith in your products.
The new camera (AR0230) that was reccomended for me to buy does not work on my raspberry pi. On the website it says works with all raspberry pi and jetson nano, but now I am told it does not work with the raspberry pi zero.
Also, the install procedures for Jetson Nano are not working the system cannot find v4l2 after install.
Sorry to hear that. It fact, the ar0230 camera is our OBISP camera which does can work on Pi can Jetson Nano. For Pi, the driver is depend on kernel version. Arducam has release the following kernel version:
I checked the current install_driver.sh and it is still allocating 400MB GPU memory. When using a raspberry pi zero allocating so much GPU memory makes the OS very unstable. I set it to 200MB and the system seems stable. The install succeeded and /dev/video0 is now available. I haven’t tried further testing, but thanks for the update.
After two months of sparsely made attempts at getting the AR0230 camera to work on the raspberry pi zero and one attempt on the Jetson Nano, I decided that your products are too expensive to use in terms of time. I will move on to use other products because I have no way of knowing if the next attempt will work or if it will not work as past attempts.
Also, as a warning to others reading this. After running the adrucam install script other cameras may no longer work unless all settings are reverted. Being able to switch between cameras would be desirable when in the testing phase.
Regarding the switching between cameras as you mentioned, you don’t need to restore all settings actually. You only need to comment out dtoverlay=arducam in /boot/config.txt to switch back to the official camera.