we need a PC with an ISA slot, you'll like why!

[Dave Lillis]

Hi All,
The club needs a pc with an ata200 ISA slot in it, this would usually mean something like a pentium 3, vintage 7+years ago. If you have one in your attic and dont need it, please let me know and i'll make good use of it. It doesnt have to be fully working, I can load windows and make mods to it.

Why?, I hear you all asking, well, a company here in Limerick were in contact with me recently and have donated an industrial CCD camera to the club. It was bought new in 1995 and was a very high spec, low light level camera at the time. It was a case of either I take it or it was going into the bin. Looking at the sensor, its about 1.5cm across, I would hope its atleast a 0.5-1M pixel camera if not more, especially given the cost I was told this thing was and it was hardly used aswell !.

I havent gone through all the documentation yet but you should see the pc spec for this thing, the cpu needs to run atleast 25MHz, I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn't mis-reading it.

The camera is a photometrics CH250 CCD camera with a peltier cooler and a liquid cooling system, the camera runs in the -30s due to this.
Looking on the web, it looks like the CH250 was sold with a range of CCD sensor sizes, so I cant tell so far what this one is.

Given its vintage, you guessed it, its not exactly plug and play, usb/firewire was only a twinkle in some designers eye at the time. This thing uses a dedicated ISA slot capture card, I have a number of PC's but none with an ISA slot in it, only about 8 months ago I threw out all my auld pc stuff thinking I'll never need it, one was a Pentium3 1GHz pc, perfect for this camera, can you believe it !!!!!!

So, anyone out there with a pentium 3 pc in the attic and if you dont want it, please let me know.


list of what was given,
photometric CH250 CCD camera
CE200A camera controller box,
isa interface card
PMIS software on floppy disk + license dongle.
LCU1 liquid refrigeration unit + piping
all interface cables needed

[Gordon Lalor]

I have a motherboard (abit bp-6) that should do the job for you, it has 768 megs of ram and 2 500mhz celerons. (I think those are the specs, its in the attic somewhere). I'm sure you have an old psu and case lying around.

[Frank Ryan]

jeasus!! There was one of these going on astromart for $5200!!!!!!
http://www.astromart.com/classifieds/de ... _id=290040

this may be of help too Dave
http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/ ... sage/42729

[Dave Lillis]

Well Gordon, if you can find it and I dont come across a PC somewhere in the meantime, then thats what we'll use. Having said that, a friend of mine thinks he has a P4 motherboard somewhere we can use, I'll know for sure in the next few days.

Frank, change the symol to £ and multiply it by 7, thats the amount payed for it 15+ years ago, so I'm told. Its not often my jaw hits the floor, hearing that was one of them.

This is a serious piece of gear, its only problem is its ease of use which is awkward by modern CCD camera standards, but I have no doubt I can get this thing working. I have the manual and PMIS on a floppy disk.
Anyone who wants to come over and have a look see is more then welcome. It's the club's after all, not mine.

[Frank Ryan]

Jeasus, that would have nearly got you a house back then!!!!

[Dave Lillis]

Lads,
I've been unable to get a pc to run this camera and dont think i could get one short of buying one on ebay for it.
I basically want to had it out to any club member who would want it, otherwise its going into my attic.
tbh, if we dont get it working in the next year or so, its not worth hanging on to.