"Secret" Project is finished *PICS*

[chevychic]

*WARNING* LONG and lots of PICS**

I finished the project I had going on my car and will be doing my truck sometime this summer. I redid all the lighting in my dash with LEDs. Not the kind that plug into the receptacle that are pretty spendy when you have several to buy, but I wired in my own LED's. Of course I had to do white face overlays for the cabriolet as well. It looks pretty tight. I have a few things to do to the lighting to fine tune it and get it perfect, but I think it turned out great.

Now for the pics...sorry guys...they're all VW pics for now:

Here's a pic of the stock gauge cluster. This isn't mine, but one identical.


This is a pic of my cluster with the overlays installed:


They're so much easier to create and install because the gauges are FLAT instead of curved. I just scanned them in and went to work customizing them. I made the VW logo from scratch. Not too shabby I think

Here's a shot of the led lighting at night. The camera picked up the light beam pretty well. In person, the light is diffused so it doesn't appear streaky as it does in this picture. In the bottom center is a digital clock which I dissassembled and wired red LEDs into. They don't show up because they have a very small candescent rating.




For the installation, I just picked up a breadboard from radio shack:


I used 4 blue LEDs with a mcd (millicandescent) rating of 4000 *I could've landed planes at my house with this high of a mcd*
I picked up the LEDs online at www.lsdiodes.com for .45 each. Way cheap compared to anyone else I looked at.
For the actual installation, I first grabbed the #1 necessity for any project:



I dremeled out individual boards out of my breadboard to supply a support for each LED and to create a power supply board to power my LEDs.

First went in a 5 Volt voltage regulator to protect my LED circuit from power spikes. Now that I have a constant 5 volts running to my LEDs, I wired in 1 15 ohm and 3 1 ohm resistors to create a resistance of 18 ohms to properly power my 4 blue LEDs at the normal forward current of 2.6 volts for this particualr LED. The LEDs are wired in parallel so each LED can receive the same current off of a smaller voltage.

Frontside:


Backside:


Lights:


I lightly sanded the LEDs with my dremel to diffuse them and spread the light out to more than a 30° radius as they come.

To light up the clock I ran a separate voltage regulator and wired in the appropriate resistors. The smaller board positioned on top of the larger board in the first picture is the main board for the clock LED circuit.

The clock circuit is spliced directly to my headlight switch and my main cluster circuit is wired to an open dimmer wire I had from my stereo harness.

The fine tuning I need to do is rework my solder job. I suck at soldering so I think I have a few cold solder joints and maybe a lifted pad or two so I get a little bit of a flicker in a my first and third LEDs. I'd also like to have the main LED circuit on it's own line from the fuse box and run a wider range of a resistor potentiometer so I can dim the LEDs as low as possible. Right now I only have a small ohm range in my current dimmer switch so the brightness barely changes when I have it dimmed all the way.
Luckily I work at an electronics assembly company and can have one of our solder assembly pros do a very professional solder job. Plus I get a discount on all my components through the company...paying .27 for a voltage regulator and .08 for a red LED is a nice break compared to $2.49 and $1.25 at radio shack!

Anyways, that was my project over 4th of july weekend. It was a lot of work, but very fun and I think it turned out pretty well for my first attempt at this.

Next project is rebuilding my transfer case. Thanks to Eddie and G for the diagrams and procedures. And somewhere in there I'll take the time to wire my truck dash with LEDs as well.