MIPI Troubleshooting

This guide addresses the most common issues you may face while setting up a ZED X One Core camera with a ZED Link MIPI capture card on NVIDIA® Jetson™ devices. Follow the steps below to troubleshoot and resolve these issues effectively.

The ZED Link MIPI Quad is used in two host configurations, and they fail in different ways. The page is organized accordingly:

• Common checks and commands, which apply to both configurations.
• Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, where the capture card is plugged directly into the carrier board.
• Holoscan Sensor Bridge on Jetson AGX Thor, where the camera data travels over Ethernet.

Start with the common checks, then continue in the section matching your host.

Common checks and commands

List the cameras seen by the ZED SDK

This is the first command to run on any host, and the one that tells you whether the problem is above or below the ZED SDK:

ZED_Explorer --all
ZED_Studio --list

If no ZED X One Core is listed, check the following points in order:

1. The cameras were connected before boot. The MIPI capture pipeline is configured at startup, so a camera connected on a running system is never enumerated. Power the host off, connect the cameras, then power it back on. There is no daemon restart or rescan that avoids the reboot.

2. The camera is a ZED X One Core. A GMSL2 camera (ZED X, ZED X Mini, ZED X Nano, ZED X One GS, ZED X One 4K) cannot be connected to a ZED Link MIPI card. The interfaces are electrically and mechanically different.

3. The driver matching your host is installed. The driver differs between the two configurations: see The wrong driver is installed for the AGX Orin Developer Kit, and No camera is detected for the Holoscan Sensor Bridge.

Then continue with the section matching your host.

Inspect the capture pipeline

Kernel messages related to the capture pipeline:

sudo dmesg | grep -i -E "zed|imx|csi|vi-output"

The ZED Diagnostic tool dmesg option gives a quick overview. Attach its report to any support request:

sudo ./ZED_Diagnostic --dmesg

The frames of the cameras do not look synchronized

The ZED Link MIPI Quad synchronizes its channels in hardware through an onboard FPGA, with a precision of 15 µs. No jumper or external wiring is required.

Software timestamps, however, are assigned when the driver receives each frame and may show millisecond-level jitter. Frames are considered synchronized when the difference between their timestamps is less than one frame period (1000/FPS ms). A jitter within that window is expected behavior and does not indicate a synchronization fault.

Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit

The checks in this section assume a NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Orin™ Developer Kit, where the capture card is plugged directly into the CAMERA connector (J12) of the carrier board. The assembly procedure is described in the ZED Link MIPI Quad on AGX Orin setup guide.

The capture card is not fully seated

On the AGX Orin Developer Kit, the card is powered through the 120-pin J10 Samtec connector. If the board-to-board connection is not fully mated, the card receives no power and no camera is detected. Power the devkit off, press the card down firmly until the two connectors are fully mated, and tighten the three screws.

Only some of the cameras are detected

When part of the cameras enumerate correctly and others do not, the problem is almost always on the affected channel rather than on the card or the driver.

Power the Developer Kit off before each of the following steps, and boot it again to check the result. Every one of them changes the hardware configuration.

• Reseat the I-PEX cable at both ends, on the capture card (J1 to J4) and on the back of the camera. The plug must go in straight and be pressed down until fully seated.
• Swap the cable with one from a channel that works. If the fault follows the cable, the cable is damaged.
• Swap the channel. Move a working camera to the suspect channel. If the working camera also fails there, the channel or its connector is at fault; contact support.
• Check the cable length. The ZED Link MIPI Quad supports cables up to 50 cm. Longer or lower-quality cables degrade signal integrity and can make a channel unreliable or intermittent.

The wrong driver is installed

The ZED Link MIPI Quad and the GMSL2 ZED Link cards use different driver packages. Installing the GMSL2 ZED Link driver on a system equipped with a MIPI capture card, or the reverse, leaves the capture pipeline unconfigured and no camera is detected.

List the StereoLabs packages currently installed:

sudo dpkg -l | grep stereolabs-

If the installed package does not match your capture card, remove it before installing the correct one:

sudo dpkg -r stereolabs-<name>

Then download the package matching your capture card and your Jetson™ Linux (L4T) version from the ZED X Camera Drivers page, install it, and reboot.

Upgrading the ZED Link MIPI driver

To upgrade the driver, the previously installed version must be uninstalled first:

sudo dpkg -l | grep stereolabs-
sudo dpkg -r stereolabs-<name>

Install the new package, then reboot the Jetson™ device.

Holoscan Sensor Bridge on Jetson AGX Thor

The checks in this section assume a ZED Link MIPI Quad mounted on an NVIDIA® Holoscan Sensor Bridge, connected to a Jetson AGX Thor™ Developer Kit over Ethernet. The assembly and installation procedure is described in the ZED Link MIPI Quad on AGX Thor with Holoscan Sensor Bridge setup guide, referred to below as the setup guide.

Because the camera data travels over Ethernet, the two things to check first are the network link to the bridge board and the FPGA firmware it runs.

No camera is detected

Recover the Ethernet connection

If the bridge board was reachable before and ping 192.168.0.2 suddenly fails, for example after a reboot of the board or because of a stale ARP entry, flush the neighbor cache and bounce the interface:

sudo ip neigh flush dev mgbe0_0
sudo ip link set mgbe0_0 down
sleep 2
sudo ip link set mgbe0_0 up
sleep 3
ping -c 3 -W 2 192.168.0.2

If ping succeeds afterwards, run ZED_Studio --list again.

Clean up the SIPL log output

While streaming, the NVIDIA® SIPL pipeline writes a large amount of debug output to syslog, which can fill the disk in a few minutes:

ls -lh /var/log/syslog                 # check the size
sudo truncate -s 0 /var/log/syslog     # empty the file, do not delete it: rsyslog keeps it open
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=200M

Contact Support

If you are unable to resolve your issue, please reach out to us for further assistance.