Dedicated to Astrophotography
One of the last interface I neglected was the USB3 portion of the Type-C connector. For one reason, the SSD requires Gen2x4 to match the instantaneous data rate. Secondly, FS309 will be running standalone in 1G ethernet or WiFi in the most of our use cases. But in the end, it would be nice if [ ]
An image is worth a thousand words. Now I have three for the first light on FS309. This July fourth holiday I made a camping trip to the California’s best dark site (in my opinion). For three nights straight I took five hours total integration per target. Late June to early July brought the best [ ]
Again, I broke my promise. What’s meant to be a week turn into a few months before another post from me. But in the months between there’s a lot of completed work on both in hardware and software. This camera also lived up to its task during the 2024 solar eclipse. Of course that event [ ]
This series will be the culmination of many years of my work. I am presenting this all-in-one astronomical camera platform solution. The goal is to have a camera capable of both low noise deep sky imaging and high performance for astronomical events like occultation and eclipses. With an application processor built in, it will enable [ ]
Two years ago, I successfully decoded the SLVS-EC protocol and made a working receiver IP block on the Xilinx 7 series HRIO. The speed is limited by the 1250Mbps on Artix IO banks or 1600Mbps on a Kintex 7. I can overclock a bit to 1.4Gbps but it’s time to push it to its full [ ]
In 2017 ChipMod took a microscopic image of the IMX235 sensor from a Sony a7S II camera, showing its very large opening of pixel photodiode. Then in early 2020 we successfully interfaced with our custom FPGA board. Now with the third generation released, we want to know if the BSI model has improved the image [ ]
In my D850 hacking post I had mentioned another Sony sensor IMX410BQT. It bares a similar IC packaging like the IMX309AQJ. The connector shared the identical pinout. We suspect it must be coming from the Nikon D780. Recently the ChipMod workshop had a laser damaged sensor from a Z6 mirrorless camera, with the sensor baring [ ]
In early May this year I have extended the work on IMX309 to other Sony sensors. These sensors share a similar serial data protocol. IMX235 is in the heart of Sony A7S and A7Sii. It has a large pixel making the fill factor better compared to smaller pixel design at the same technological process. In [ ]
In 2016 when I build my KAC-12040 camera, I wasn’t satisfied with the Xilinx VDMA IP. It closes timing only at 150MHz. It neither supports arbitrary size for a compressed stream. So I wrote my own DMA engine to exploit the full bandwidth of AXI-HP port on 7-series devices. I had managed to close timing [ ]
Two years ago we identified the sensor inside Nikon D850 with ChipMod lab. There’s plenty justification for this sensor in astronomy. It’s the first back-illuminated full-frame CMOS mass produced. It is very fast. It supports various movie resolutions up to 4K30P and 720P at 120FPS. It also has electronic first curtain and fast enough scan [ ]