SC4 Webcam - ICX414AL based




I originally had planned to use an ICX424AL for this camera, but Greg Beeke offered me his ICX414AL for a good price, along with his adaptor board to connect it to a 14pin CCD based webcam. The camera was based on the newer Philips SPC900NC webcam.

This shows the ICX414AL (1/2") on the left and the original ICX098BQ (1/4") ripped from the webcam.



The cooling consisted of a heatsink and fan salvaged from my sister's broken laptop, with a 40W peltier and cold finger. Both are powered by a 5V 8A PSU. This shows it on full power after 5 minutes - ambient about 21C.



The whole thing is built into a small Maplin's project box, with the fan sticking out of the top.



Greg's adaptor board is glued to the top of the heatsink, with wires running through to the CCD underneath. I fitted some sockets to where the CCD was on the webcam pcb to allow easy connection to the adaptor board, as well as allowing the original CCD to be easily fitted for testing. All the connections to the webcam modifications (to the chips for long exposure, and for amp-off) are connected to a small 7-way connector glued to the board.



I also unsoldered the USB socket, and resoldered it on sideways, for a better fit.



This side of the camera shows the cooling power input, long exposure switch, USB cable, LX and amp-off (Greg's version) circuit, and connection to the parallel port on my laptop. The variable resistor allows the voltage drop for the amplifier to be adjusted.



This shows the CCD side, mounted on the cold finger, with t-mount adaptor (actually an M42 lens mount from an old camera - but it works!). It's a bit of a mess, but it all works, and should be pretty waterproof now - in case of any more accidents in the future. There was a bit of a catastrophe when fixing an earlier CCD problem, as one of the legs came off. I was eventually able to solder a wire onto the tiny bit of metal left, and epoxy everything in place.




The final thing (cooling not yet reattached)



Here are two images of the same object with the two CCDs to compare: ICX098BQ and ICX414AL.
The exposure for the ICX414 (with IR-filter) was half that of the ICX098, and you can clearly see the increased FOV as the pixels are 9.9 microns vs 5.6.

Here are a few darks frames to compare too:
Original ICX098BQ, 300s, 25% gain, ambient temperature
ICX414AL, 300s, 25% gain, no heatsink attached yet
ICX414AL, 300s, 25% gain, cooled to about 5 C