Hi, so first of all, I don't know what's going wrong here, but perhaps there are a few things we can check.
1. Can you confirm that you're running the most up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS image? The 64-bit version is recommended, I believe, for Pi 3s.
2. Can you check that it has 1GB of memory? The first line of "cat /proc/meminfo" will confirm that. And how much swap (look for "SwapTotal")?
3. Are you using an official Raspberry Pi power supply? Other types of power supply have been known to cause problems.
4. Is there anything unusual about your setup, or have you installed any other software on it?
5. Is there anything suspicious in "dmesg" after it's crashed?
6. If you have a spare SD card, perhaps you could do a fresh OS install, update it ("sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade -y") but don't install or change anything else, and give it a try? I've just done this with a Pi 3 and ov5647 and tried your little Python script, and so far as I can tell, it seems to start reliably.
It's true that crashing out to the login can be caused by running low on memory, and the system decides to kill your desktop, but I can't really think why that might be happening.
1. Can you confirm that you're running the most up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS image? The 64-bit version is recommended, I believe, for Pi 3s.
2. Can you check that it has 1GB of memory? The first line of "cat /proc/meminfo" will confirm that. And how much swap (look for "SwapTotal")?
3. Are you using an official Raspberry Pi power supply? Other types of power supply have been known to cause problems.
4. Is there anything unusual about your setup, or have you installed any other software on it?
5. Is there anything suspicious in "dmesg" after it's crashed?
6. If you have a spare SD card, perhaps you could do a fresh OS install, update it ("sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade -y") but don't install or change anything else, and give it a try? I've just done this with a Pi 3 and ov5647 and tried your little Python script, and so far as I can tell, it seems to start reliably.
It's true that crashing out to the login can be caused by running low on memory, and the system decides to kill your desktop, but I can't really think why that might be happening.
Statistics: Posted by therealdavidp — Tue Jan 06, 2026 2:09 pm