Depending on the kit one has to populate and
solder the boards with the components.
There are two boards one for the power supplies and one with main
processor and analog circuits.
First prepare to work with the appropriate tools
then get some experience with 'damagable' boards before going at the real
device.
A word of caution....
Prepare your working area! Use ESD equipment.
Fasten the cam to something.
Handle the cam with care and always protect the CCD
surface.
As the camera supports multiple CCD chips one has to place icx255 and
icx429 chips on a carrier board.
Those
ccd carriers do have an opening where a coldfinger can be put in. For my
purpose a 4mm alu part worked well. Also the pins length is a bit critical
as the ccd shall not touch the optical window later but also be fastened
enough in the ic pins of the main board. I used a stripe of pins but
soldered them even into the pcb - one may see it
here.
In the end one can get nice images - but having used only
webcams before the capturing and processing is quite different. Also
exposure times are not longer in the <60sec range so prepare for
guiding the scope.
The icx429AKL is a CMYG colour ccd that requires
additional software to get the colour image from the raw CFA frame.
AstroArt 3.0 has a nice plugin to do so. Properly exposed and processed
the cam provides a sharp
and neutral image.
Follow this
link for the images taken so far.
Here an image with a 300mm Rubinar
lens.
