NVIDIA Jetson CSI Camera bring up, debugging and development guide

Keywords: NVIDIA Jetson, camera drivers, CSI cameras, Linux kernel

Description

This wiki page provides a guide to camera driver debugging, sensor bring-up, and driver development on the NVIDIA Jetson platform. It covers essential diagnostic steps, tools, and workflows for validating CSI camera connectivity, verifying I²C communication, checking device-tree configuration, reviewing kernel logs, testing V4L2 operation, and confirming Argus camera-stack functionality. This resource is intended for developers integrating custom camera modules, writing or modifying camera drivers, or troubleshooting sensor issues on Jetson devices.

Required tools

This section lists the essential software utilities used for camera bring-up and debugging on NVIDIA Jetson platforms. These tools allow you to verify I²C communication, inspect V4L2 video devices, and perform low-level camera diagnostics.

• I2C-Tools: Provides utilities such as i2cdetect, i2cget, and i2cset for scanning the I²C bus, reading sensor registers, and validating camera presence. Install with:

 
sudo apt-get install -y i2c-tools

• V4L-Utils: A set of tools for interacting with Linux Video4Linux2 (V4L2) devices. This is the primary tool for listing video devices, testing raw streaming, querying formats and inspecting V4L2 controls for linux devices. Install with:

 
sudo apt-get install -y v4l-utils