Zombie CCD!

[wayne weedon]

Hi

First let me say we are total novices here and owned our telescope just a couple of weeks. It's an Orion Europa 6" for your information, bought second hand on ebay.

The Telescope was bought more to satisfy my 6year old daughters curiosity, but I would not of done it if I had not had a latent interest.

From initial fair results with an old webcam or two over the last couple weeks and also some reasonable lunar stills via our Fuji compact digital shot through the eyepiece I wanted to try something else out of curiosity.

Many many compact digitals end their life being dropped or sat on with the lens extended and suffer the dreaded "Lens Error" fault.

So onto ebay again and search for a reasonable camera suffering from this problem. A Nikon P50 8.1 Megapixel seemed interesting and was snapped up for 99 pence! This is a CCD based camera not CMOS.

It arrived and it had stuff rattling arounf inside! Sat on probably.

Nothing to lose bar 99p + a couple pounds for postage. So I extract the lens as carefully as possible from the front.

Notice a IR proximity detector and fiddle around for a while and work out the boot up lens check logic. Camera comes to life with no lens error.

Shutter is in the lens so no saving that, and therefore it's no longer capable of Stills. BUT it has a 640x480 30fps video mode.

Hot glue an adapter to the front and start playing.

Here's a video from this evening.

YouTube - saturn 3rd June 2010 Nikon P50 "Lens Error" Camera

Nothing on some of the images and videos I have seen from others, but I'm fairly pleased as at least my Daughter can see Saturn which is what she has most wanted to see for the last couple weeks. I've watched it a fair bit, BUT she's always in bed long before the best windows to view.

Wayne.....

[wayne weedon]

Next I need to learn how to get a little more magnification. Still the images captured by the ccd are larger than we can currently observe through the 10mm eyepiece.

I have since machined up a new adapter and glued it to the camera body. This has the 42mm T mount type thread so maybe we can use a camera adapter with eyepiece. Not sure how viable this is.

Wayne....

[Earl]

A Barlow lens will help with the magnification

[wayne weedon]

Will try that Earl, and also eyepiece projection. Just programming an adapter at the moment. Will run it on the cnc lathe later when "normal" work is done.

Wayne....

[Earl]

very keen to see the eyepiece adaptor i could use one myself

[wayne weedon]

Well I didn't quite get to the roundtuit.

But More thought is required I think. With our telescope came a "camera adapter" Basically a T-Mount system with facility to fit an eyepiece inside. This may be ok for some scenarios but for me it seemed clumsy.

Tell me if I wrong! But it seems you need to fiddle with the relative mounting position of the eyepiece.

With there being no lens in "Zombie Lens Error Nikon" the eyepiece may need to get a lot closer to the CCD but alas that would be way back from the point the eyepiece is no longer in it's correct bore inside the commercial adapter. Also the 25mm Plossl eyepiece we have is far too long to even fit.

I'll have a think about a more elegant solution for general use and knock up a couple prototypes.

Wayne....

[wayne weedon]

Earl

Next I'm going to try using our Panasonic Camcorder with eyepiece projection, so made this adaper today for the Pansonic 27mm filter thread to a T-Mount. Hopefully we'll get an opportunity to try it soon.

Wayne....

[Hypernova]

I'm interested by this, my canon ixus 80 is which I bought new last year succumbed to a lens error in April, got sand in it DOH!

I believe the ccd in canon compacts to be of good quality so I'm thinking it could be modded in some way to capture lunar a planetary AVIs on my dob, though I think without tracking it would be next to useless on my scope??? Suppose I could capture and stack frames of the object moving across the FOV assuming its not going too fast?

[wayne weedon]

Tom

Depends I guess if it's worth fixing or not.

But looking at the spec of the ixus 80 it's capable of 30fps video at 640x480 like the Nikon is.

On the Nikon the lens check logic on boot up was looking to see if the lens was parked and able to be moved off park position.

On shutdown it was checking for the lens being parked.

I did try dismantling the camera to see if I could reconnect the shutter, but alas I could not work out how to totally dismantle the thing! So put it all back together else I would of lost patience with it! Would of been nice to have had the shutter in front of the CCD as the Nikon does have longish still exposure settings as well as a High ISO mode. All this is useless without a working shutter.

Wayne....

[Hypernova]

I don't think it's worth fixing any more, I have attempted to free the lens but I still end up with a grinding noise and an out of focus image so I am guessing that the lens is quite buggered and also the exterior shutter mechanism seems to have fallen apart in the process.

It was an alright camera when it worked but it had problems with the LCD screen and the ccd on occasions with hot pixels and red blotches but they were repaired when it was still under manufacturers warranty.

There was a manual exposure setting of up to 15 seconds which I used a couple of times to take some images of NCLs which came out quite nice. ISO went up the 1600 on this also which would have been alright in low light settings for some astro photos.

Stargazers Lounge - Hypernova's Album: Tom's astro pics - Picture

Stargazers Lounge - Hypernova's Album: Tom's astro pics - Picture

[wayne weedon]

Then have a go if nothing to lose like in my case.

Hopefully it's a similarly simple cludge to get the thing to boot up without a lens. I'll take a picture of the Nikons prox sensor in a moment.

Wayne....

[wayne weedon]

Picture

Basically the proximity sensor is a slot which a portion of the lens outer shell filled to block off the IR Led from the detector.

On switch on the Nikon needs this slot blocked before pressing the power button, and immedatialy unblock as soon as the lens motor runs.

On switch off it should be blocked before pressing the power button.

If I had been able to get the thing apart properly I would of fitted a momentary switch to achieve the same effect.

Wayne....

[Hypernova]

Looks like quite a good mod for my camera, is that adapter a 2" or 1.25"?

I'm also not sure how that lens mechanism detaches from the body and can't have a look now because I can't find the ruddy camera, everything's been shifted around this week and I can't find anything.

I remember how the entire casing comes off the camera but I don't know any detail of how the lens is attached and if it safe to just prise the whole thing off carefully without damaging the fragile ccd.

Also for attaching the adapter, would it be ok to use "hard as nails" or epoxy resin stuff instead of a hot glue gun as I am lacking one?

[wayne weedon]

Looks like quite a good mod for my camera, is that adapter a 2" or 1.25"?

I'm also not sure how that lens mechanism detaches from the body and can't have a look now because I can't find the ruddy camera, everything's been shifted around this week and I can't find anything.

I remember how the entire casing comes off the camera but I don't know any detail of how the lens is attached and if it safe to just prise the whole thing off carefully without damaging the fragile ccd.

Also for attaching the adapter, would it be ok to use "hard as nails" or epoxy resin stuff instead of a hot glue gun as I am lacking one?

Tom

The adapter shown in the last picture is a T-Mount adapter I machined from Delrin. It's Hot Glued to the body. It does have a spigot section that locates in the Cameras Lens opening snugly. I guess epoxy would work as well. I do like my hot glue gun though very handy tool and cheap.

When I removed my lens it was all done from the front. Literally slowly removing parts using as little force as necessary. The CCD should be way back fairly safe as in my Nikon. The nikons CCD did have the auto focuser lens in front of it anyway. That was discarded too obviously.

Most of the lens assembly on the nikon was molded plastic so easy to nibble away at.

Wayne....