Making your own camera?

[JonH]

Has anyone here thought about or had a go at making your own camera pretty much from scratch?

Jon

[JohnP]

No but would be interested - I modified my webcam for Long Exposure & then changed the chip from a colour one to much more sensitive B&W but this was following instructions on internet - all started by a Mr Steve Chambers who now runs/ owns ATIK..

What type of camera are you thinking about?

John

[JonH]

I had to drop some bits I had made into the electrical lab at work and asked one of the guys if he knew of any ways to reduce noise, to which his response was yea make your own camera, not easy but doable!
He thinks there is a chip I can have left over from testing. I don't know anything about it as it's locked away in stores, only that it's big! Just waiting to find out if it was radiated as part of the testing, if so it will be no good.
Was wondering what I might have got myself into.....

Jon

[Mike]

I did consider this and looked at the datasheets of CCD's, etc. There are several open source hardware projects on the internet for producing cooled astro cams. However obtaining a large enough CCD to worth bothering with is pretty expensive when you are ordering just one. I'd be interested to know how you get on if you attempt it.

[JonH]

I don't know what its specific purpose exactly was, but seeing as they were testing it to see the suitability for use in space I would think it's about as good as they get..... (one can hope)
Talking to him about how to do it etc, he said you need to cool it to at least -40c to get real benefit and ideally have it in a vacuum and have a low read out speed. Or something like that, he was starting to lose me a little with a whole load of stuff I didn't understand by that point.
Apparently we have done them with around 2 electrons of noise, now that I like the sound of!
Not sure I like the idea of putting it in a vacuum, makes everything more difficult and would have to take the camera to work every few weeks to have it pumped!

[Ian]

I looked into some of the early home made cameras and if I recall, the challenge is the timings of the signals the CCD needs. Generally it seems, a CCD will have a partner ASIC that is designed to work with it. The clever bit is synthesising the signals without the ASIC. Oddly, it seems you can get CCDs quite easily, but the ASICs not.

This is compounded now by SoC designs that throw the ADC, memory controller, memory and USB interface all on the same chip too which then makes it harder to do a Chambers sort of modification.

I've had a few sleeps since then, so as always, consumption of salt is recommended.

[JonH]

Ok, to be honest you lost me a little there, but think I got the gist. My knowledge of electronics is going to be pretty harshly stretched with this project.
Most of the conversation I had about it so far has been about getting the noise down to the smallest possible.
So far it's, the slower you read/download/whatever the data off it the less noise you will get along with using ethernet to connect it as would be the simplest.
As for how I control it from the laptop I really haven't a clue, software is another department all together at a different sight about 40 miles away of which I have nothing to do with at all.

Jon