[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Hi.

This project has taken a new direction, after some false starts. One of the issues has been finding a suitable housing for the electronics. Recently, I bought a cheap used battery grip off ebay - a ready made solution, with the added advantage of integrating supply for the camera.

The PCB follows the battery cradle form to fit in the cradle cavity. But it will be necessary to drill a few holes for the DC power connector and push buttons - nothing that renders the battery grip unusable.

This iteration has a number of new features - the ability to calibrate and configure the controller based on the host configuration, and make fine adjustments to the cold finger temperature on the run. It also supports dew heaters and camera power.

The cooling controller should easily adapt to any DIY cooling mod, and for cold finger set ups within 0.5C of setpoint, if not less. Sensor resolution is ~0.3C, using TMP36 linear temperature sensors.

A few more tweaks and it will be ready for production then, its first try out on my 1000D cold finger mod.

EDIT: Tidy up the top board.
EDIT: Added battery grip image
EDIT: Added schematic - spaghetti