A shutter can be a very usable addition to the Audine camera to prevent streaks coming from bright stars. It is possible to remove these by image processing but when a shutter is used they don't appear in the first place. A friend of mine (Rob van Vreden), who also built an Audine camera, sent me a shutter from a Panasonic MC10 videocamera. He uses it with great succes. This type of camera can be obtained second hand at radio-swap meets or in surplus shops. It is still sold as a spare part bij Panasonic, ref. Nr. VXL2149, and it costs about 28 Euro.
It seems to be made for the Audine! The height of the camera housing must be a few mm higher than the standard housing as described on the Audine website. This part of the housing is just a piece of aluminium square tubing so it should be quite easy to replace it with a slightly longer piece.
It was not that easy to find a piece of tubing so I soldered a piece myself using special solder. Four pieces of aluminium strip 50 x 2 mm of 78 mm length were used. Left in the picture is the original Audine housing, right is my homebrew housing. It doesn't look too bad I think!
On this page are a few pictures of the shutter, the opening is 22 mm and the greatest hight is 19mm.
There are a lot of wires but you need only connect the blue and pink wires of the red connector.
The pink wire is connected to ground, the blue is connected via an opto-coupler to +12V to keep both circuits separated.
This opto-coupler is driven by the TB3-connector of the Audine camera via a 330 Ohm resistor.
The brown connector can be disconnected from the shutter for it is not needed. The small motor is close to the circuit board! Take precautions to avoid a short circuit!
I'm planning to fasten the shutter to the upper plate of the housing. When this is finished I will post some pictures on this page.
I tested the circuit below and it works fine with an ancient TIL111 optocoupler. Other optocouplers should work too. This TIL111 was waiting for me in my junk box. The shutter draws a current of only 15 mA from the 12V supply and this voltage is taken from the fan. The optocoupler is commanded by the TB3 port that is located inside the Audine camera. More about this is found on these and these pages.
