Building a CCD Camera

[NickRose2006]

Has anyone from the stargazers lounge built there own CCD camera from scrap? I'm trying to search on the web on how to build your own CCD camera. I have several camera's and one camcorder that have CCD's that have no use anymore and I have time a patience on my side and would like to try my hand at building one.

[Merlin66]

Richard Berry had a "Cookbook" design for a small CCD camera?

You could also try the Y! group:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/QCUIAG/?yguid=322612425

[callump]

There is also the Audine camera: The Audine Project

Callum

[sandspider]

Aren't these easily available made up at low cost on astrobuyandsell?

Or are you just after some fun

[Ryan Parle]

The Audine Camera is probably the best DIY project out there, it is fairly modern compared with the spec of the CookBook camera project.

I did quite a bit of research in to the Audine project, and after some lengthly translations to english, i finally decided that it was going to be too complicated for me to do.

There is lots of testing & calibration to be done with oscilloscopes & signal generators, i don't have access to the necessary test equipment and whilst a very kind chap in wales offered to lend me his own test gear, i wasn't confident that i would even know what i was doing with it.

Hats off to you if you pull it off. keep us posted I'd love to see it done!

[rfdesigner]

I started building one around an FT12 chip about 12 years ago.

I never got it fully operational though.. interesting project and I've still got the bits, as a result I had a crack at a patent but Kodak had beaten me to it by about 18months.

I used an FPGA for driving the CCD and a 100ksps 16 bit Burr brown ADC, correlated double sampling etc. I built an ISA card for the PC (that worked 100%) with FIFO on it so I didn't have to worry about windows mucking about.

Building one today would be much much easier. I'd use a PIC for control which is where I had the biggest problems... FPGAs timing isn't always "as smulated".

Today I'd just buy a camera. Much of the cost you are paying is for the CCD and you have zero chance of blowing the CCD if you buy a complete camera, unlike making one. I would argue that the mechanics is possibly the bigger job, yes you could build an uncooled camera but frankly why bother?.

Fundamentally I wouldn't expect to save any money making one.

I've looked at the Audine one and it looks good, but these days it's looking slightly dated and even in kit form it's quite a lot of work to complete.

Good luck if do go ahead and try a self build.

Derek