For those of you who have built the Cookbook 245 camera, you will quickly see that mine does not appear anything like the original version in the manual. I thought that the camera was serious enough to warrant a careful packing job as well as the need to protect the camera during transport. This case not only holds all the electronics to run the camera, it also has storage room for the camera head in a padded area between the top of the box and the top of the control panel. Along the back wall of the control panel are the AC power connectior plug, the camera head connector, and the cable connector for the parallel port signal cable to the computer. All the necessary temperature controls and voltage/current monitoring can be displayed by the digital panel meter to the right. Peltier voltage (1.25-13 Vdc), Peltier current (0-15Amps), Peltier Temperature (+25 Deg C to -45 Deg C), and CCD temperature set point (-10 Deg C to -45 Deg C) are selected by the Digital Panel Switch below the panel meter on the right. The lower control knob in the middle of the control panel adjusts the Peltier voltage from +1.25 Vdc to +13 Vdc. Maximum current output from the Peltier supply is 15 Amperes. The control knob above the Peltier knob is used to adjust the temperature Set point for the CCD chip. The adjustment range is from -10 Deg C to -45 Deg C and is read from the panel meter directly in Centigrade. The temperature control in my camera uses a proportional temperature controller loosely based on the Tybee Evens design with modifications to control the Peltier power supply regulator directly. I get a +/- .1 Deg C temperature control with this design. To the left are the two AC power switches for the Peltier supply and the camera power supply. Just to the right of the power switches are 4 LED used to indicate the power supply voltages are operating correctly.
This unit is cabled over to the Camera Head with a multiconductor cable with the Peltier wires along the outside of the cable. One end of the cable plugs into the rear of the control unit through a 36 pin D style centronics type connector. The other end which plugs into the camera head, is a DB-25 type connector. This arrangement allows me to seperate the camera head from the control unit for ease of packing and storage in the control unit. This cable is about 15 feet in length and has multiple shields around certain critical signal wires. This keeps the signals clean between the control unit and the camera head. As I'm sometimes on mountain tops where TV and Cell Phone towers are located, I wanted to keep stray RF from inside the electronics.
The photograph of the control unit was taken with a Casio QV100 digital camera at 640 x 480 pixels.