my homemade taillights

my homemade taillights

Well not really.. I was working off and on in my free time doing a LED taillights retrofit.. It seems like nobody does anything intresting here anymore so I'll post some teasers of my exploits.

Got JDM taillights from my buddy dionel (rolla4me) a bit over a yr ago (stock on left)..


a few months later i put them into my mom's oven


and a few months after that I picked up a soldering iron and some circuit boards


ALMOST finished product, I will apply a light coat of smoke over the clear section (there's a hint of what else i'm planning)


everything lighted up


had a couple hundred left over LED's so..


soldering is fun


lighted that up


thats all for now

damn, how much did the led's cost? and what kind are they

I used a combination of Luminled, Quickar, and Piranna superflux 70-100mA LEDs. They cost about $15 per tube of 60. The white 100mA ones were most expensive @ $1 a piece.

how much for a pair? lol

Looking good. Nice hint too. Cant wait to see it all get installed. I was planning on also redoing my set too with a pair of F5 this month. Btw have you figured out how to make the new LED flasher not flash so hyper? I still haven't solve mine yet. Just wondering

i hear you just need the relay to prevent that ^^

those look really bright!

Damn! Very nice. I was planning to do this project too. Now I have some inspiration.

Hehe Ive been working on this too actually. Sucks that my taillights are plastic welded so I got much more work ahead of me and not sure if I want to go through it. Hopefully DEPOs arent plastic welded because Ive got to do something with 1200 red-orange lumileds

Yeah JspeXAE102 tails look easy to take apart. I hate how the 8th gen is plastic welded too. What I did was messy, I have to nearly gutted and hacked all of the back off in order for me to retrofit LED brake and flasher.

SD_S added 1 Minutes and 25 Seconds later...

Tried the relay method, but I still cant solve the problem

Yah Ive done that with a dremel on a spare set of tail lamps. Lets just say its really not fun and its really not easy. I had headaches for days because there was sooo much plastic flying around and I didnt use a mask

Yea I hate dremeling ABS plastics. last couple of time i did it I had bitsfly into my eye even though I was wearing safety glasses. I was glad when I saw my tails were held togethere with a thermal glue but even then it was a pain getting them apart because of the clips.

haha yah your so lucky. Ive got all my supplies laying around for 1year+. I guess I should have found out if the tails could be opened or not

Same here. My set of F5 have been collecting dust. Still waiting to find a cleaner way to open my taillights

Really nice....

Homemade rear garnish too?

yup, used the license plate lights from a AE92 (also running LEDsD

Hmm... Do you have picture with it mounted?

not yet

get them on...

Damn. You should market those on ebay or something. I'm sure you'd bank on something as unique and clean as that.

dang talk about a project lol, NICE! mad props man. U should mass sell those lol

yea weather sucks and i've been sick lately.. I got boxes of goodies sitting in my room just waiting to get installed.

nah its way too much work to make it worth my time. Beside the process took me about 3 months working on and off.

Where do you buy your circuit boards and LEDs from? I want to do something similar, but I can't really find a place to buy the parts.

radioshack?

online mostly, mouser.com has everything but LEDs, I got some of the LEDs from ebay and some from the sales forum at hidplanet.com.. radio hut don't sell superflux LEDs and is usually out of stock or messy with sorting resistors. Their copper clad boards are preety good tho.

What do you need exactly? I have lots of leftover LEDs and other parts..

I want to tear open my OEM outer taillights to retrofit LEDs, but they're plastic welded shut. So instead of butchering those, I want to make an LED 3rd brake light. I want it so it looks clear until I step on the brakes. I just need a small circuit board about 2 x 5 inches and several dozen LEDs and resistors. I'll have to buy a soldering iron as well and an external power source to test them. I have a ammeter already. I've worked on breadboards before since I used to be an electrical engineer major.

I just rigged a power supply up using a old computer power supply since all I needed was a 12V DC source.

You should be able to do a 3rd brake light with 20LEDs or less, about 5 120ohm resistors and a 12V regulator unless you want to completely populate the board.

Ok. 20 leds should do it. I'm going to attempt to open up my outer and inner taillights afterall. I should be acquiring an extra taillight set to mess with fairly soon. I'll just have to cut a large opening from the back instead of the oven method. The only thing I'm not sure about is how many ohms I would need in each circuit board. How did you calculate how many resistors you'll need? V=IR? V being 12V? I see how you placed them in parallel and placed the power from there.

Well first of all, in car votage fluctuates between about 11 and 16 depending on conditions. Some people design them to be in the middle of this fluctuation 14.4V but the best idea is to use a voltage regulator to regulate voltage to a maximum of 12V. This allow you a constant to design your array around. Also, the typical Super Flux LED accepts a 2.5V Vf (forward voltage) @ 70mA

It is good that you remember ohms law because thats pretty much all you need, no KCL, KVL, optamps, or pointless circuit diagrams that goes nowhere. I hated circuit analysis, that's why i'm doing mechanical. So I can just give you the equations:

Example of resistor calculation for just one SF LED:
R = V/I
Resistor value = (Source Voltage - Vf)/Current (Amps not mA !)
so
(12-2.5)/0.070 = 136 Ohms = closest resistor value is 150ohms

Another important calculation is resistor power handling, as you know resistor comes in 1/4W, 1/2W, 1W, etc
P = V*I
Power (W) = Voltage drop * LED Current
= (12-2.5) * 0.070 = 0.665W = you'd need to use at least a 1W resistor

Now usually you'd want to run them in series of 3 or 4, just make sure your series dont exceed source voltage (4 maximum for 12V source). 4 is the best bet because they dissapate the most power so you can use resistors with a lower resistance value and smaller power handling value.

Resistor calculation for a series of 4 SF LEDs
R= V/I
= (12 - (2.5*4))/(0.070) = 29Ohms
P = V*I
= (12 - (2.5*4))* 0.070 = 0.14W

sooo you can safely use a 33ohm 1/4W resistor.

Don't take these values as given tho. when you buy the LEDs you are given a spec sheet for the specific bin with a vtyp value. Also you typically don't want to run the LED at maximum current, I usually dail back to 55-60mA.. LEDs are very sensative to heat, running them in a close environment during a hot day at maximum current may burn them out prematurely. Same goes for resistors, you typically don't want to exceed 60% of what it is rated for, ie the most power you should dissapate with a 1W resitor is 60% of 1W = 0.6W Hope I was clear enough.

I have a rough idea. Since I'm going to do this during my spring break, I'll look over my engineering circuit analysis books again for good measure. LOL

btw, how did you deal with the brakes lights during low(running lights) and high(brake lights)? These leds will be replacing 3157 dual filament bulbs, so I'll have to rig up low and high intensities.