Up to the testing phase.
Note: The BluTak moisture barrier will need 10mm wide strips of speed tape on the left and right side for added protection to the tops of SMD components that come close to the backside of the copper plate. They don't touch and as you can see, I have drilled holes to provide clearance to those that sit higher than the sensor backplate.
Finished the TEC installation and added a temperature sensor - it failed and had to be replaced. The replacement was a neater installation than shown here.
Insulated cold plate with speed tape given the proximity of the main board metal covers.
It needs a suitable heatsink. The one I have is too big. Not sure what impact that will have on performance. I suspect the one I am using at 200 watts exceeds requirements by a mile with no added advantage.
At 1.3 volts the TEC pulls just under 2 amps. A further increase in voltage, as suspected, heats the system. So the sweet spot is ~1.25 - 1.35 volts on my multimeter.
A DC-DC convertor which is yet to arrive will provide a little control over temperature control, but not as much as I had imagined. The system is limited by heating of the conducting strip, but this is preferable to using a large external TEC which may risk condensation internally or damaging cold - it's a trade off.
I suspect better performance can be had with an additional and bigger TEC installed along with the heat sink... perhaps just a waste of energy. Alternatively, and possibly a better solution is a lower powered TEC. More energy does not necessarily equate to more cooling with this technology.
I think the TEC is too big at 5A and 4V for the job - 2 amps would have been adequate. The advantage of the conducting strip is that it keeps the air in the camera warm and may assist with defogging of the sensor
Furthermore, I don't know how reliable the location of the temp sensor is in providing an fair estimate of performance. So I will go with the improvement in dark signal as a guide.
Screenshots before and after cooling with dark noise reduction. Left column is cold plate temperature. Right hand is room temp. I haven't evaluated the actual reduction and will get to that later. As far as appearances go, it looks a lot better.
That's it for now.
EDIT: Nearly forgot to mention that the CF door obviously had to be modified. I'm using tape to hold it in place at the moment and have one or two ideas about how to make the card more accessible - WIP.