My latest camera plans.

Thought this was more appropriate to this equipment forum than astrophtography. Mods please feel free to move if you dont agree.

Anyway I've been thinking about putting a new camera together for a while so this evening, I ordered a nice shiny new CCD chip. Sony ICX414ALL. Its a 659 x 492, 1/2 inch chip with 10micron square pixels! (bit pricey at £140STG. I've also ordered a peltier cooling module and some copper from radionics to make this fully thermo electrically cooled.

Basically the CCD would be a bit more sensitive than the one in the DSI II but not quite as many pixels, and of course my camera will be 8 bit not 16bit as the DSI II is. That said I'm very hopefully of coming up with a very capable imager. I will be documenting the build and post details when its done.

Thats fantastic Dave..i wish you the best of luck with your project and hope you get excellent images as a result of your work and creativity!

Dave,

I have a Panasonic GP-MF602 Industrial Camera with a 768 x 494 pixel 1/2" CCD. I'd been thinking of converting it to use for astrophotography. It sounds like you've done this kind of thing before.
If you've any schematics or tips or any info at all you can pass on to a first timer I'd love to try building my own. I'm an electronics eng so don't worry if you think you're getting technical with any of the info you can supply.
I had thought about using the camera as is but hooking it up to a PC would mean shelling out for a decent frame grabber board or some such, and then for software to manage the images.
I'd appreciate any advice you can supply.

Sounds like an interesting camera Dave, I dont think you'll loose any serious resolution going to bigger pixels, with the ssia's coming up (next year for me), I'll be seriously looking at a sbig camera, the model isnt yet decided, with sbig its hard to wrong..

Sounds like an interesting camera Dave, I dont think you'll loose any serious esolution going to bigger pixels, with the ssia's coming up (next year for me), I'll be seriously looking at a sbig camera, the model isnt yet decided, with sbig its hard to wrong..

Yep the SBIG cams are certainly the real deal!! Resolution wont be an issue, since I'm not doing planetary stuff with this. I'm more interested in the MUCH higher sensitivity these huge pixels will offer. I've seen people use high end cameras and then bin the image 2x2 to get that kind of sensitivity. The main purpose of this camera will be imaging those really really faint galaxies and helping DaveMcD with that supernova search!! This camera will be perfect for that.

Dave,

I have a Panasonic GP-MF602 Industrial Camera with a 768 x 494 pixel 1/2" CCD.

Hi John,

Just had a look at the data sheet for the panasonic camera you mention. Your right, that you would need a frame grabber board to digitise those images. The shutter is controlled by dip switches, this might suggest that it MAY be possible to keep the shutter gate held high by interfacing directly to it. However its hard to say. I wasnt able to find the exact IC number of the CCD chip but it is described as an interline device that would suggest that the CCD chip might be removable and then could be integrated with another camera. To be honest though I think you might end up with more grief than you need if you try to modify that.


I do plan to document absolutely every single stage of building this new camera of mine and write it up in an article on my website.

Basically what I am doing is taking a philips toucam pro and replacing the CCD with this new ICX414. The first stage though, is to make the camera capable of unlimited exposures. This isnt too hard, it involves tapping into the clock driver chip on the toucam and routing two (very small pins) in a small comtrol board which uses an IC switch (like 74LS04) or similar to allow the computer parallel port to 'hold' the shutter gate on the CCD open. It's not that hard to do, I've even come up an easier way to interface to those tiny pins!!

The CCD chip itself is fairly easy to install, just needs a few leads re-wired and 0.1microfarad cap across two pins to make it work. (You can of course leave the standard chip in place or use the Sony ICX098BL (B/W version of the toucam chip, which is a pin for pin match).

I then plan to cool the chip using a peltier module. I'm looking for a reasonably low power one as I want to power it all from a 12v battery pack. Apart from the TEC cooling, I've done all these mods in several camera at this stage and they've all worked out fine.

Next by reducing the current flow to the sensor material itself, noise is further reduced. The big downside is that the toucam has 8bit A/D conversion in built. I havent seen anyone who has managed to modify this successfully.

This route of building the camera is a LOT easier and more fun. My wife keeps asking, why dont you just buy an astro CCD camera. I keep telling her that that would be no fun. I guess I just love tinkering!!