My Projects

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Published 10 Mar 2018

Reusing Linear Charge-Coupled Devices


I have a pile of old CCD (charge-coupled device) imaging sensors from old fax machines and hand-held page scanners that I would like to use in projects. Recovered CCDs

Overview

Faxes and document scanners often contain linear CCDs. CCDs recovered from older faxes and scanners are often mounted on their own circuit boards with buffers, and amplifiers, but require external clocking and ADC (analog to digital converter) support to connect them to a digital system. To use these as image sensors for projects like an electric cell sorting machine, I was thinking I'd need more than Arduino, and maybe an FPGA. But now I think FPGA would be overkill.

Hardware description

The CCD linear arrays (usually thousands of elements) are exposed to the light to be imaged, the analog values of each sensor element are transferred in parallel to an analog shift register, which is then shifted out to an external ADC. So the ultimate output is a serial stream of digitised values representing the imaged line.

Recovered CCD modules

On the sidebar there is a list of CCD modules that I have recovered from various pieces of scrap equipment and the linked pages include pinouts etc.

References and Additional Resources

Datasheets

1) PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION