OctoPrint / OctoPrint/OctoPi-UpToDate

libcamera camera not detected on RPi5 running image with new camera stack

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bug
Dominant language
Shell
Stars
71
Forks
14
Avg merge
3d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

The problem
  1. Flash camera-streamer based image 2025.09.30.141704
  2. Attach RPi Camera Module 3 to RPi5
  3. Boot image on RPi5
  4. Observe that rpicam-hello --list-cameras reports that no cameras can be found

Preliminary internet research proposed that installing the full rpicam-apps package vs. just rpicam-apps-lite would make things work. Alas, a quick image test build did not confirm that.

A manual full upgrade to all the latest package on the image made rpicam-hello finally report the camera, so something in one of the latest package fixes this. Alas, just running a full upgrade on the image build is out of the question as too many of the pre- and post-install scripts seem to depend on the underlying hardware architecture, which in a docker based update process differs from a real Pi just enough to cause problems.

On top of that, once the camera gets detected, we run into a blocking issue with camera-streamer not even supporting the RPi5 from what it looks like thanks to its utterly stupid lack of a hardware encoder, see ayufan/camera-streamer#149.

Proposed solution

Currently no clue how to solve this. Frankly, I'm getting to a point where I might just put a big fat warning about use of the quite mediocre RPi5 on the download page and leave it at that.

Additional information

No response

Verification
  • I'm a maintainer or collaborator of OctoPi-UpToDate and allowed to use this issue type

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the issue with the listed image build and Raspberry Pi 5 setup, starting with rpicam-hello --list-cameras. Compare the image's rpicam-apps-lite and upgraded package versions to identify what enables detection, then assess the separate camera-streamer Raspberry Pi 5 limitation described in ayufan/camera-streamer#149. Done requires a supported path for camera detection and streaming, or a documented limitation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
docker, raspberry-pi, shell
Domain
build-system, embedded-iot
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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