LED Rear Lights

[Eeyore]

I keep seeing nice lights. Everywhere i go nice LED lights. Now i really like the lights on the E48 as they have lots of LEDS or individual lights. Mainly due to the fact i played too much NFS Most wanted a few years ago!



Now I really like how the modern LED indicators flash that they are instantly on and then off instead of the 306 old school kind of fading on and off. Ive looked at finding LED rear bulbs as i presume the fading effect is just caused by elements heating up and being turned off etc. So first can anyone find a decent set which are actually coloured orange? All the ones on ebay seem to be just white or red.

So i was thinking why not rig up like 20 leds on each side in the red section of the rear lights as brake lights etc and then 10 along the bottom as indicators. I would then have the instant on and off style and it would look different to the normal block of light. pretty much the same as what EACruise did on his black 306 but in the standard P3 lights instead of the bumper.



Continuing this crazy idea... I do lots of stuff with microcontrollers at uni and chips etc. Arduino boards have 54 outputs so this took me to another stage, What if you had like a 10x3 grid of LEDs for brake lights and then a row of 8x3 for indicators and then with some programming wizardry you could have like an animated arrow on your indicators? So like moving chevrons from side to side?

A flashing light is much more obvious than a solid light and you can get flasher kits on ebay which flashes your rear lights for the first 2 seconds of braking. Ive seen this once on a car but its more common on motor bikes. So this no brings me to the legal side of things. im pretty sure brake lights have to be 'solid' which means no flashing and no animated things? With a chip you could simply have two programs one for on the road use and one for shows so this would get around it.

And finally... I cant really think of a way to attach the LEDS into the light. I think you would have to make the circuit on some kind of electronics board and either mount it into the light unit or place it in and then fill the unit with resin so that its pretty much stuck in? LEDs have a tendancy to brake after time so if you poured resin all over the place youd never be able to replace them as they started to brake!

So yeh... an idea ive been thinking about for a while! D: Comments?

[THE_Liam]

Sounds like a lot of dicking around for not much of an advantage, but tacky I reckon...

[Eeyore]

Sounds like a lot of dicking around for not much of an advantage, but tacky I reckon...

itd be different and id get to play with microchips

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maybe leave the brake lights and just do some kind of animated indicator.

[Chris]

Hid planet and go on the led section. Should give you a idea on where to start.

[Ruan]

The moving lights would be gay as fook...

But you could connect it to some high power drivers, but then drive it with PWM, then you could make your normal side lights go brighter when you hit the brakes etc...

Mercs seem to do this on their front DRLs, if you have a car which shakes a lot, look in the rear view at the Merc DRLs and you'll notice it looks like they're hovering and moving about - it's PWM that causes it.

[ginge191]

Sounds like a lot of dicking around for not much of an advantage, but tacky I reckon...

What did LEE-EA advantage from his work...what does anyone advantage


Rowell; i'm not even going to convinvce you to do this, just do it! Don't stick to the normal, you've obviously got the brain, knowhow and tools to do it!

[cully]

someone else playing with LED's.....
go on build something even if its on bread board just to prove it works

[Eeyore]

someone else playing with LED's.....
go on build something even if its on bread board just to prove it works

i reckon itll probably get to this stage and then ill get bored haha. Ill probably make a start once im back at uni! However for now i may look at just getting some LED indicators to just wack in.