What about a way to replace the warning and check lights with bright LED's as well? It looks like the "parking lights" light is pretty hard to see with it being so dim compared to the 4 LED's.. my only concern would be seeing all the other back lights. Or maybe it's just the picture?

 

My experience with replacing the indicator lamps with LED's wasn't too good. The LED's usually resulted in "hot spots" which were usually off-center in the indicator window, rather than a smooth even glow from the incandescent lamp. A few of those also rely on the resistance of the lamp to function properly. Otherwise, when replaced with LED's, they always glow.

 

Can you tell me why you used a 330 ohms resistors, how did you come up with this value? Just curious to know.

 

A few different ways. There are several sites that offer calculators to help you determine the correct resistor for your application and when I put in the the 12V source and additional info, the couple that I used said to use a 330 ohm and 1/2 watt. I also saw a similar write-up done on an eclipse and they too used 330 ohm and 1/2 watt resistors.

The superbrightleds site has the specs for each LED and you can use the numbers to check.

 

Each indicator light seemed to have its own bulb, so I guess if you wanted to take the extra step you could replace each one with an LED and a different resistor probably. The reason I choose the LED's that I did is because they have a 120 degree spread instead of the typical 30 or 40 degree which should keep from hot spots or lighter in one spot than another, but I haven't tried it so I can't say for sure. There aren't any backlights on in the picture except for the "Parking lights on" light and I'm not too worried about it. I honestly think they're bright enough as it is.

 

Buy direct replacement LED bulbs from www.superbrightleds.com They have them that fit about every automotive socket.

something like this:

 

I did mine a while ago, I love them.

also notice the odometer. that was last week. 200001 miles.

 

azmi951, nice! Two questions:

1) are those blue LEDs with a little UV?

2) are you lighting up from beneath, like TheStock, or is that the light pattern lighting up from the original sockets?

 

Mmmmmm.... not in this case.

A PWM (or "mark-to-space") dimmer will give you the most LINEAR dimming curve with LEDs. That's certainly not to say that a rheostat or potentiometer won't work though.

A potentiometer wired as a potential divider will indeed cause exactly the shutoff at a certain point which you describe, but you'll still get a lot of range with a single white LED in this particular setup for the following reason:

An LED does indeed have a fixed forward voltage drop, below which it suddently drops into non-conduction. the voltage is NOWHERE near the "12-point-whatever" volts that a car operates on. An LED's voltage drop varies with LED colour, Red is usually somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 Volts, Blue is a little more, so too is white. However, the shutoff point for a white LED may be somewhere between 3 and 4 volts. That gives you 8 to 9 volts of forward conduction, where the brightness is governed by CURRENT. The resistor defines the forward-biased current. For everything over 4 Volts or so, the resistor looks VERY like a resistive load to the dimmer.

Now, as load voltage at the dimmer output drops, luminous output of the LEDs will drop, going to zero at about 4 Volts. -You may think that means that the LEDs will "drop off" a long way before the incandescent bulbs used elsewhere in in the interior, but not necessarily: An incandescent bulb takes a small voltage to warm it up before it glows anyhow, so you'll probably find that there could even be a moderately good correlation between the dimming behaviour of the two.

Oh, and if you have access to the wiring without pulling the dash apart again, you don't have to replace the 330-ohm resistors to dim the lighting: Just wiring a single 180-ohm (1/2 Watt) resistor in series with the 4 LED/4 Resistor setup that you already have should give you an approximately 50% reduction in brightness, of you don't want to pull it apart, but crave some softening of the dash lighting, relative to the other illumination.

Keith

 

They are only slightly blue and might be called "hyperwhite", they photograph really blue though. The lighting from the headlights is both HID (stock DOT color temp) and 90watt H4s but it looks really green for some reason.

Yes my set up is like TheStock's. I soldered them into the ribbon cable on the back of the insturments. I did not do any drilling though. I have had them in there for over a yer and have had zero problems.

 

Each LED is wired in parallel. I wouldn't be using 4 330-ohm resistors in series. I wish I still remembered everything from my electronics class, but I don't. So what would you suggest then for each individual LED?

Forward voltage on mine is 3.3v and reverse is 5v.

 

Am I the only one who thinks the Flaming Eye lights are very cool?

I want these......really like the blue lights but I know the red would look more OEM..........

 

The secret to making a uniform light when facelighting is creating a diffused surface. That is why I used to mold my LED/resistor sets into the acrylic. Once hard I could create a diffused surface.

Ahh, I came across my molds the other day. I really wish I had time (and space) to fire up production again.

 

Great! Thanks!

Here is another option for the non experienced:

http://www.jageng.com/944/944LED.htm