Camera module 3 doesn’t seem to autofocus

[Fornaxtwo]

Testing the camera in the nighttime I noticed the stars were slightly out of focus so investigated in the daytime and whatever the distance to the object it appears out of focus.If I put my hand in front a metre away the focus stays the same. Is there something I have to setup prior to using the camera? I have the focus metric turned on btw the best it gets is 4.

[EricClaeys]

Take a look at the focus options for auto-focus cameras.
You'll probably want an "autofocus-mode" of "manual" so it doesn't try to auto-focus for each picture, which can take a long time at night.
Play with the "lens-position" setting until it looks good, then add --lens-position X to the "Extra Parameters" setting in the WebUI.

Stop Allsky, then run something like this to check the focus:

libcamera-still --timout 1 --shutter 5000 --autofocus-mode manual --lens-position X

Replace "5000" as needed to for exposure, and replace "X" with different lens positions. "0.0" is infinity so I'd start there.

[Fornaxtwo]

I ran the text as your message in a terminal window with AllSky stopped, then ran
rpicam-jpg —output test.jpg to see the result. I tried different values of 0 to 5 for lens position and could not see any difference, the test was indoors looking at a ceiling light fitting.
The only thing I noticed was there was a warning about legacy SDN tuning, not sure what difference that makes.

thanks for your help

[EricClaeys]

Looks like there might be a hardware problem.

[Fornaxtwo]

I think so too 😕