I was looking for something of interesting on an astronomy second hand marketplace and i found an old damaged ST-8300M SBIG CCD CAMERA. The camera was totally dead and the PC wasn't able to detecting it. The previuos owner was contacting SBIG but they refused to repair and propose to him full PCB board replacment for more than $1000... The second hand costs of this kind of camera are around €500 so the owner decided to sell it as a damaged camera for a very little price and i decided to buy it with the risk and hope to repair the camera.
When the camera arrived to my home i couldn't wait and i began to disassembly soon! I have to admit that without my previuos expererience in self builing camera i wouldn't be able to do nothing...A lot of chips needed to be controlled but i was lucky to find pretty soon that there was a short on the 3.3 volts power supply.
But which chip was damaged?
I desoldered few components till i discovery that the short was coming from the FPGA chip, an IC that control every camera functions. Most probably the motor driver chip for shutter control, for a unknown reason was fault and it has supplied an higher voltage that burned the FPGA. My only worry was for the EEPROM chip because the firmware of the camera is stored there and SBIG doesn't share anythings with customers of old legacy products, replacing it the camera lose his original firmware...
I replaced the motor driver, FPGA and even the USB interface chip that probably was damaged too and when i finally powered on the camera ,with my big surprise, it has started to work and the PC was able to detect and connect to it. I was really excited while waiting for the first image download.

I was so happy that finally i could use a mono CCD camera with a great sensor like the KAF-8300M and starting to do narrow band imaging.

With my new Baader SHO 6.5nm filters i started to capture the Rosette nebula, something that i never captured before. Unfortunately i couldn't captured the S filter  data and i combined the H-Alpha and OIII in an HOO palette.
Now i need to adjust the tilt because the optical train is changed and need to be adjusted again. It is pretty visible in the bottom left corner.
It is really impressive the higher contrast given from H-Alpha filter... now im waiting the nice weather with a lot of impatience!!!

PS i would to say thanks to Marco that sold me for a very good price his ST-8300M camera and give me the possibility to try his SBIG FW-5 filter wheel.