Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Compatibility

David,

The modes that are supported in Raspberry would be perfect for a start, but with an increased MIPI speed of course :-)

/Fredrik

Any update about the compatibility of the new Rapsberry Pi HQ Camera for Jetson Nano? Did somebody manage to get it working?

Hi,

We bought the camera from two different stores, since the delivery time was slow (I suppose due to covid19) we decided to start the driver ahead. Last Thursday we finally received the cameras and as some of you already noticed the camera is not detected in the i2c bus. I think we have identified the problem with help from NVIDIA and Leopard. We will be running the tests today and tomorrow with this fix in place. If this solves the problem we will share it with you. Once this issue is solved we will start running tests with the current version of our driver.

-David

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I am still waiting for mine. Good luck with the driver.

David,
I understand your pain in ordering as it took me over a month to receive the hq camera and the 6mm lens. I just received the camera yesterday and was looking forward to running some opencv stuff with it on the nano. After seeing it was incompatible I found this forum and was relieved to see these recent posts. Glad to see it is actively being worked on, please let us know when the driver is ready, I will be checking this blog regularly :)

Hi all,

As an update from RidgeRun side, we got the cameras this week and we were able to get our driver working for 1080p resolution using V4L2 in the Jetson Xavier NX. We will work on finishing the support and cleaning it up to make it available for you all.

Moreover, in order to make the camera work, you all need to make a little change on the hardware side, otherwise the camera will never appear on the I2C bus. You can get more information about the hardware modification in this wiki page: https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi_HQ_camera_IMX477_Linux_driver_for_Jetson

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As an additional note, just to clarify:

You will be able to see the camera in the i2c bus with this small hardware change. This is mandatory to let the driver configure the camera and for the Jetson to capture. However, we are still in the process of testing the driver. We recommend you to wait on us to release the driver before making the hardware change. You won’t be able to capture without the driver. We are working on it to release it as soon as possible.

-David

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Does the camera modification mean it can’t be used with a Pi anymore? I’m willing to sacrifice it if that’s the case, but if it could go back and forth that would be nice too.

If you have some very fine soldering iron tips, you could solder on a small SPST switch and use a replacement resistor (or the original R8 resistor, if you can salvage it through desoldering.)
I’ve done similar mods before. A good soldering iron, steady hands, firm work holding, and a good magnifier absolutely help!

You’d basically hook it up as:
R8 pad A → thin wire → switch → resistor → thin wire → R8 pad B

Hi @DavidSoto-RidgeRun, first of all, thanks for working on the driver - it will be great to use HQ camera with Nano.

I’d like to ask for a little clarification regarding the resistor removal mod. Looking at the schematic, removing R8 will make IMX477 chip stay in “enabled” state all the time, rather than be controlled by Jetson’s camera enable pin. My question is: does this mean that the control of XCLR pin is unnecessary, and could as well even be removed from the HQ camera? If otherwise, how is your driver going to go around being unable to control this pin? Perhaps just controlling the voltage regulators is enough?

Additional thought: I wonder if it could be possible to keep control of XCLR pin with Jetson by replacing R8 with 8.8k resistor. For what I understand, the APX803 will keep XCLR low if input voltage is below 2.93 V, and in high-impedance state otherwise. If 8.8k resistor is used as R8, 1.8 V on enable pin will result in (via 4:5 voltage divider with R7 from 3.3 V) 3 V being fed into APX803 - should keep it enabled. On the other hand, 0 V on enable pin will result in 2.64 V into APX803 - should keep it disabled and put IMX477 into reset. Please let me know your thoughts.

Re: soldering. I trust myself to get something like you describe right maybe 1/4 of the time. About the limit of my skills is adding a pi zero header. Anything smaller than that and i’ll probably make a mess out of it. If somebody is skilled enough, however, I’m sure there’s a market for these modified cameras.

thanks to RidgeRun for their initiative to provide the driver. the required hardware modification just kills the whole use case here of utilizing Pi HQ camera in Nano.

  • Very few will consider soldering their camera
  • It will only be used (in case of successful soldering) for nano i.e. he is losing it for Pi

The way forward I see it is that Jetson ecosystem venders to step up and manufacture these cameras in the same way they did for the original Pi camera. There were many options that are designed specifically for Nvidia boards. This is much better in many aspects.

I have purchase Leopard Imaging LI-IMX219-MIPI-FF-NANO which match somehow the same price tag for Raspberry camera and at the same time designed specifically for Nvidia with better lenses. Such initiative is what we are waiting from these venders.

I can see there are many products based on IMX477 but their price tag is above $200 which I believe includes the driver cost. This is done now free of cost. So I guess we should see the prices goes down.

In addition, it might be better to utilise the power of Nvidia SPI here to design the camera in a better way to adopt the full features of this sensor e.g. HDR, 4-lanes for high frames rates instead of 2-lanes

I don’t think any soldering is required to get it working. You just need to snap the resistor off, but I’m hoping a software workaround will be found so that isn’t required. I am personally grateful RidgeRun is going to provide a free driver. Something something gift horse + mouth.

Hi All, we are excited about getting the camera working. Let me provide my comments for each of your concerns:

  1. We posted here the change to be done in the camera because in a previous post I told @riegelbasti that I was going to share the fix to see it in the bus. Now that we can see it we are not longer blocked and we can continue with the driver development.

  2. @mdegans. We have not tested the camera again in the Raspberry PI after removing the resistor, I think it is better to wait until we post the full driver and instructions and then we will get back to see if it works in the Pi again.

  3. @snarky, thanks for the SPST switch trick.

  4. @micmys. You are correct, if we remove the R8 resistor the camera will be always out of reset. This is an easy fix. For driver development this should be enough. We will look for options to see if the camera can be set in standby mode through register settings so it does not consume power if the camera is not being used. At this point, just to validate the concept, we are more interested on getting the camera out of reset, configure it for different resolutions and be sure that we can capture the frames. RidgeRun is a software company, we don’t do hardware, if you can give t a try replacing R8 with a 8.8K resistor and report back if it works it would be great!

  5. @EbrahimAli, It would be interesting to see if after removing R8 if it still works as mentioned by @ mdegans. Once we are done with the driver we will give it a try as well. The Jetson ecosystem partner is strong and there is a high variety of cameras, we just want to give an option to use the HQ camera as well.

We will keep you posted with the progress!

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Hi All,

The driver now supports 1920x1080@60 and 4056x3040@15. @CarlosR92 added controls for Gain and Exposure. Next step is to work on the ISP calibration file with Leopard Imaging. No stability issues have been seen after removing the control of the reset line (no endurance testing yet). RidgeRun will let you know when it is ready for you to give it a try.

-David

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Thank you David for the update. The 4056x3040@15 mode, does it support HDR. I have seen in the datasheet DOL-HDR for this mode. That will be great. Does Nano support doing this in the hardware level.

Hi there,

I have a Jetson Xavier and RPi HQ camera.
Is your driver public already? I couldn’t find it anywhere.

André

Hi All,

The driver is under review. We expect to make it public by the end of this week. It will be free to download and try in Github, so any improvement that you do and want to share with the community please just send a pull request.

-David

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David,

Could you update the instruction to work from command line + SD Card, not via SDK Manager

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Hi everyone,

We are glad to announce the early-version of the IMX477 Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Compatibility in our Github repo: GitHub - RidgeRun/NVIDIA-Jetson-IMX477-RPIV3: NVIDIA Jetson IMX477 HQ RPI V3 camera driver

You can find documentation about how to build, install and use the driver.

The first version of the ISP config file created by Leopard Imaging was included, you can follow the instructions to use it in your setup.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

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