Diary

• April 22, 2012
  
  • Installation
    I finally helped Randy install the new dome light setup in their black M roadster. It all went smoothly. I replaced the 3-pole connectors for the passenger side harness (that powers the dome light) with 4-pole connectors and added the hot-in-accessory wire (tapped from the violet/white wire in the passenger kickpanel area). The hot-in-accessory wire goes directly to my driver board and allows use of the red LEDs alone when the key is in the accessory, run or start position. The reason to not allow use of the red alone when the key is out of the ignition: you may have the dimmer all the way down and hence not know that the red LED driver is running and consuming power. Best to not give it power when the key is out. My driver board needs 2 other inputs: the output from the dome light switch and ground. These are the two wires that went to the original dome light bulb. I cut them and splice to my driver board with solder and heatshrink, in the interest of conserving space behind the windshield trim.

    Randy took care of drilling the holes for the pushbutton and the dimmer pot. He also did most of the trim removal, and he got stuck with putting all the trim back together (at another time).

• May 29, 2011
  
  • Installation
    I installed the new dome light setup in my car. The driver board fits fine in the headliner, on the same side as my button for red lighting. The dimmer pot fits fine on the other side.

    The key to the electrical...

    There's a 3-pin connection in the passenger A-pillar, which has supervised lighting, hot-at-all-times and ground. I removed the connectors and replaced them with 4-pole connectors so I could add hot-in-accessory. The connector shells are 61.13.8.380.696 and 61.13.6.925.611. I just moved the 3 existing pins, and added a new one for hot-in-accessory. I used a tailed pin 61.13.0.005.198 and tailed receptacle 61.13.0.005.197. I tapped the hot-in-accessory in the passenger kickpanel (violet wire with white stripe).

    I removed all of my old dome light stuff; the Luxeon drivers and the wiring. That included removing the two pins from the 3-pole connector that leads to my AVR-IO board in the e-box in the engine compartment.

    Everything appears to work as intended. Hooray for better-late-than-never progress.

    I'd like to replace my footwell lighting with all white, or maybe try amber. The red LEDs get too hot. I can use Luxeon Rebels mounted on 10mm square MCPCB with heatsinks, except in the passenger footwell where there are space issues above the underpanel.

• October 23, 2010
  
  • Control Board
    I assembled 9 more control boards. I'm officially out of parts to make more.

• October 2, 2010
  
  • LED Board
    I fixed the 8th LED board, which had one bad white LED. I then attached heatsinks to it. I also created a harness to connect it to the new control board.

• Control Board
  I finished adding dimming functionality to the control board. I also selected a potentiometer to use.