I finally plucked up the courage to open the Philips SPC900NC and had a good look at the insides before deciding to go ahead with the mod. The instructions I followed here were very good but left me with a few questions. It’s not clear how the connection to the parallel port is made and half way through the instructions there’s a mention of a manual switch which again is not very clear.
I’ll draw up a cicuit diagram when I get a minute to help others who get this far then panic. Luckily I’ve done some work with parallel interfaces before, an intruder detection system and a robot controller, but that was years ago. I found a 25 pin D connector amongst the many bits of junk that I’ve collected over the years, it was actually an old COM2 face plate of an ancient PC, and I dug out some CAT5 cable that I had left over from cabling the house.
Making the LX mod involved soldering 6 wires onto some easy to see pads which turned out to be very easy indeed. The tricky part was trying to get everything back into the original case, but I got there eventually. I’ll get a bigger box soon to rehouse the camera which hopefully will allow me to add some cooling. I’ve not connected the switch wires as unplugging the parallel cable restores the camera back to video mode. If you do the same then you only need to solder the pin and pad 8/13 and +5v and gnd.
Testing the mod was another matter, I was using the free version of K3CCDTools but had some trouble getting the camera to produce any image and started to worry that using the 4016 instead of the 4066 was not a good idea. I ordered the full version of K3CCDTools3 from Peter Katreniak and he sent the unlock codes the following day.
I’ve changed this image from the original after experimenting with the settings
I changed the SC camera settings to those shown here and tried out my first 5 second exposure. It seemed to work. I reduced the gain and tried a longer exposure, 10secs, and it still worked so finally took a 20 second exposure to just to see if amp glow was visible.
I know the focus is out, I used a lens from the 1004x camera and just screwed it in until I got an image. I may redo these images sometime and get the focus right first. I’ll also do some dark frames at some point to let you all know how noisy the camera is.The red glow is from an illuminated power switch which was the only light in the room at the time. The light area near the camera is where I failed to plug all the holes and some LED light leaked out. I’ll take the LED off next time I open the camera up.All I need now is a clear night, and cup of coffee to keep me awake and I’ll be pointing at every galaxy, cluster and nebula that my EQ6 can find.Good luck if you’re going to have a go, it really is easy with a good soldering iron.
But as always, don’t blame me if you break your camera while making this mod, it worked for me, any changes you make to your camera will invalidate the warrenty and could leave you without a camera.
With blue sky showing between the clouds I thought I may be in with a chance of setting up the scope. I had to wait until 22:45 before Polaris appeared though, so until then wasn’t able to polar align.
I’ve invested in an EQ-6 Pro Mount to help me keep my camera’s pointing in the right direction (