Enable Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 Wide after Arducam 64mp

My development pi has had an Arducam 64mp camera connected for my camera software development. I liked the quality of the camera but have at various times been frustrated with the software requirements to use the camera. It’s required both a custom kernel driver and a custom fork of the libcamera software packages. That’s meant that to use the 64mp camera I needed to reinstall the arducam suite after nearly every apt upgrade cycle, and definitely ones where the system kernel got updated.

I spent several days trying to get the remnants of the arducam64mp removed from my development system. I’d even built a fresh sd card image of Raspian Bullseye to make sure that the hardware was all connected and working properly.

In the end the fix was rather simple, if obscure.

First, remove or comment out the dtoverlay line from the /boot/config.txt file and make sure camera auto detect is enabled.

# dtoverlay=arducam-64mp
camera_auto_detect=1

Then run apt install with the –reinstall option for the libcamera packages and the raspberry kernel package.

sudo apt install --reinstall -y libcamera-apps libcamera-dev libcamera0 raspberrypi-kernel
sudo systemctl reboot

Then reboot. That should be then allow you to run libcamera-hello and verify that the new camera is working.

I’d found a reference How To Enable RP Cam V2 After Arducam 64MP that didn’t seem to work for getting the V3 wide camera working, perhaps because the focus hardware in the V3 camera made the 64mp think it was active.

I asked the question of how to remove the drivers on the Arducam Forum and then answered my own question.

On to playing with my new Camera Module 3! (I bought the Arducam cases from Amazon because I really liked the fit. The new wide camera protrudes from the front with enough clearance for the focus to function.)