My first CCD camera was DYI and a lot of fun (but you need a lot of spare time!) I had a small amount of experience in electronics and programming, enough that with some technical books like Richard Berry's Cookbook camera and Christian Buil's CCD Astronomy I was able to design and build a camera around a Kodak KAF-400 CCD in 1994. All the electronics were soldered onto Veroboard. By using a PIC microcontroller to do all the clocking and communication with a parallel port the design could be simplified.
I remembered first light I was really dissappointed with the sensitivity. A week later I discovered that I'd missed a requirement in the Kodak Datasheet that required that the CCD output need to be activated by grounding it through a resister. When I did that, wow! Here is an image I got with this camera:
http://www.pbase.com/terrylovejoy/image/32822669
The second camera was the Genesis G16 (as Terry B points out an Audine Clone). Another DYI, but the design was already done. This was a nice camera and I still have it.
I've since been using DSLR's recently mainly because of the wide field of view and low cost but I think thats going to change soon now thanks to people like QHY
. And as Gama said its not really worth going the DYI route these days.
Terry