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.

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.

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.

• Linear Array CCD Data Acquisition System Based on FPGA - description of TCD103D operation (Chinese, English).
• Fabrication of multichannel spectrometer using CCD one-dimensional image sensor and PIC16F84 (Japanese, English) (Uses TCD132D CCD).
• Mention of the fax CCD board using MN8051 (Hungarian, English).
• Analog Signal Processing Circuitry for a linear CCD.
• Fun with a Linear CCD, interfacing to a Sony ILX555K colour linear CCD.
• Flatbed scanner CCD reverse engineering, interfacing to a NEC μPD3598 colour CCD.
• Hackaday linear CCD, TCD1304-based linear CCD module driven by a Nucleo F401RE + Raspberry Pi.
• Using CCD linear image sensor TCD1304AP with the Raspberry Pi

• Toshiba linear CCDs.
• Toshiba TCD102C linear CCD datasheet.
• Toshiba TCD102D linear CCD datasheet.
• Toshiba TCD103C linear CCD datasheet.
• Comparision of Toshiba TCD142/143 and TCD102 linear CCDs.
• Toshiba TCD142D, TCD143D linear CCD.
• mn8051.pdf

If any referenced page no longer exists, try looking for its URL on http://archive.org.