Is there a way to tell whether the camera module is present without actually trying to record a video or take a photo?

I thought maybe i2cdetect would show it up since the camera uses the i2c, but it doesn't show anything on the bus

  • The camera uses the CSI (Camera Serial Interface) bus on the Pi. If I am not mistaken, that's not i2c. – Marco Poli Sep 3 '13 at 12:59
  • @MarcoPoli, the CSI bus is for the image data. There is an I2C bus on the connector too for setting up the camera. – John La Rooy Sep 3 '13 at 20:09
  • Unfortunately, I doubt there is a way to detect this automatically. Why else would they have you have to enable the camera in raspi-config? – syb0rg Sep 6 '13 at 2:34
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    @syb0rg, because camera use affects memory partitioning in the GPU, and I believe that needs to be set before booting. – greggo Sep 8 '13 at 17:22
  • Have you activated the camera if not do so by going into the boot menu [sudo raspi-config] in the terminal and im not sure where about it is but somwhere you can activate the camera – user12650 Feb 6 '14 at 19:36

The camera module is connected to a different i2c bus than is exposed on the GPIO headers, so maybe if you try different values for the i2c bus when you run i2cdetect this will show up the module.

  • No, I tried the correct bus – John La Rooy Sep 16 '13 at 10:21
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    Which bus did you try, I'm not sure which bus it is on, but it certainly won't be the one commonly listed in i2c tutorials, etc. – Dan Nixon Sep 16 '13 at 13:18
  • there are two. They were actually swapped over between the rev1 and rev2 boards, so tutorials may be using either depending on which board they are for. i2cdetect really just shows smbus devices, which is a subset of i2c – John La Rooy Sep 16 '13 at 18:24

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