Cooling the IMX camera

[tschoenfelder]

Dear all,

last winter/string it became obvious, that my SCT will not work without having a dew heater. But as well it became clear, that in summer the sensor will get hot. The three devices will require some power plug to use one 12V charger only. A first test showed, that the peltiers are generating a lot of temp difference, so a regulation is a must.
So I created a board for an Arduino Nano, reading the dew ring thermistor, a temp and humidity module and steer 3 12 switches.
I added an indi device to control it from EKOS. My IMX219 has no temp sensor, so snooping the camera will not help.

As I had issues with my duck tail hitting the mount I tried to make the 3d printed box as small as possible (a bit of very small ...).
For the IMX219 I imported the layout model of the Raspi V2 cam in to Fusion and created the housing. The heat sink lies on the peltier lies on the heat pad lies on the IMX219 back side.


The internet/YT shows examples of an IMX477 with a copper bad being on front and back side of the IMX477, but I fear the front to collect humidity and by this water drops killing the sensor or generating dew on the front 1,25 inch IR filter ...

Hope, this generates some thoughts ...

Best wishes, Torsten

[scriptorron]

Thank you for sharing.

Last year I tried to build a cooled IMX477 HQ camera. I bought a TE cooler (Peltier), mounted it it on the backside if the camera PCB (with a thermal pad between Peltier and PCB), made a thermal insulation between cold and hot side and added a big heat sink to the hot side (with thermal paste). When powering the Peltier, the cold side got colder than the hot side. But both sides still got warmer than the ambient. I came to the conclusion that I need an even larger heat sink or a water cooling. Both would be too heavy for my mount. Furthermore the power consumption was above my budget (I power the whole telescope with a 12V 25Ah accumulator). So I gave up.

Your solution is very interesting. I should think again about building a cooled camera. Maybe I made something wrong or my TE cooler was damaged.

[tschoenfelder]

@scriptorron : thanks for these insides. My Peltier made at full 12V one side burning hot, but the other felt very cold. It's still high in the Prio list for me ...