led tail lights?

[custom_90lumina]

anyone done this? im doing a complete led tail light conversion on my car and just wondering if anyone here has done it and if so if they had any little problems with it such as blinker speed and such but what i have in plan sense the lumina has three red sections on each tail light is that i will have two [] (squares) in each red section and in the square have another one for blinkers then inside that spell our BACK and on the passenger side have it say OFF!...will post pics when complete

[jeremy]

i will have two [] (squares) in each red section and in the square have another one for blinkers then inside that spell our BACK and on the passenger side have it say OFF!...will post pics when complete

 

.....sounds very tacky

[GP1138]

[White93z34]

I'm with ya on everything up till "Back Off"

[custom_90lumina]

anything else then??? i was thinking big square for running lights then smaller square for brakes then inside that a arrow for blinker?

[rich_e777]

Sounds like one of those things thats a good idea in your head but after a good amount of money and time it ends up not looks as good as you thought.

I redid my tail lites once to resemble the earlier Cutlasses from the 70`s and 80`s with the twin vertical stripe tailites and it looked stupid as hell, i didnt even take a picture thats how stupid it looked.

You have any pics of your car?

 

I saw a Z34 the other day that had all that sticky chrome stuff you can get at autozone or similar establishmnets and the guy actually took the time and made it look good and he had it everywhere but not to much but what he did with his tail lites was to black out the smaller outer sections and had the strips outlining the trim in between and around the edges. Maybe hes on cardomain and i`ll find a pic but it was sweet looking.

[jeremy]

Just do sequential turn signals and call it a day..:

[Ramblin Garage]

Just get a Monte Carlo and get these

 

[RobertISaar]

or you could make up the same plans i did(for the former Fehlmobile), just scale them for your application...

 

in theory, a normal 1G GP taillight(not the wierd reversed ones) can fit ~650 5mm LEDs and bezels in it's housing. that's approximately 1,100 lumens for each taillight with the LEDs i had in mind at 20mA.

[custom_90lumina]

o well ill try it and post some pics and see what you guys think if i get more negatives then positives ill just throw my stock ones on o well its only gonna cost me like 10 dollars to do it for the leds

[LuminaPower92]

I like my plain black tails. Good Luck bro.

[intern8tion9l]

Just do sequential turn signals and call it a day..:

new mustang owners have played that out hard core

[Addicted To Boost]

new mustang owners have played that out hard core

They come from the factory like that on the new Mustangs.

[Mel87]

 

These are on the truck I have:D

 

Anyways, LED's only look ok on certain cars.

[intern8tion9l]

They come from the factory like that on the new Mustangs.

 

 

well i fell sheepish...

[custom_90lumina]

finally got the leds from china did some measurements and i cant do two squares one in the other with the arrow would be to small for the blinker so am doing one square 9x9 leds every other for driving lights and the others will be for brake and the arrow is 18 leds only have part of it wired up so far for the prototype but bright as ****

[jeremy]

any updates ?

[iroc2]

+1 ive been thinking about doing the same myself on my regular gp tails. im looking at like $220+ last time i looked into it just for the brake light sections, id be using good quality LED's thats the only reason why its so much. i dont want to waste my time with the 5mm round chinese LED's.

 

as for the sequential stuff, ive considered doing that too, but wiring arrows into the blinkers, almost like the turn signals on some semis

 

<<<<not exactly like what i want, but kinda like this, but in 3 sections like the mustangs, i need to get some kits and play with them, ideally i would like to do about 4-8 different sections for some originality.

 

havent really come up with an awesome idea for runninglights to brakelights on yet besides playing wiht the whole checkerboard, and going everyother block and dim for the runnign lights (like the gameboard), to bright full solid

[skitchin]

havent really come up with an awesome idea for runninglights to brakelights on yet besides playing wiht the whole checkerboard, and going everyother block and dim for the runnign lights (like the gameboard), to bright full solid

 

What you're probably looking for is PWM(Pulse Width Modulation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation - basically a method of controlling the brightness of LED's through pulsing the supply voltage. This is a pretty standard feature on micro-controllers, boards like the Arduino have designated pins for this function. Also, you'll want to look into shift registers if you plan on doing some sort of animation across a large array of LED's.

 

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/733

http://hackaday.com/2011/11/05/controlling-shift-registers-via-spi/

[white4d96]

What you're probably looking for is PWM(Pulse Width Modulation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation - basically a method of controlling the brightness of LED's through pulsing the supply voltage. This is a pretty standard feature on micro-controllers, boards like the Arduino have designated pins for this function. Also, you'll want to look into shift registers if you plan on doing some sort of animation across a large array of LED's.

 

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/733

http://hackaday.com/2011/11/05/controlling-shift-registers-via-spi/

 

 

Someone's done their homework on this. I've also heard a lot about people using microcontrollers to do funky things with large arrays as well. I was considering doing that to do sequential turns on both my cars, but have lacked motivation to do either

[iroc2]

^ya the only thing i probly wont do like my brother did on his tails is make circuit boards... idk if i want to go that far, but it would make things easier... idk i need to save money and start getting things togather.

[RobertISaar]

not sure what you have against 5mm LEDs.... the ones i use are blindingly bright, even at just 10mA each.

 

FWIW, mounting them is going to be the least fun part of this entire project. you could go somewhat ghetto and get large sections of proto board and mount LEDs directly onto it. i may end up doing that for the ones i have in mind, otherwise i'm drilling ~600 holes into some other material(ABS looks like it could work) PER SIDE. then you may just need to either bus the hell out of the proto board, or just start out with strip board now that i think about it.

[iroc2]

just personal opinion/preference. idk i just dont trust them. led technology has come a long way since the 5mm's. to each his own.

 

austin is on another forum with my brother, he went all out and made complete custom circuit boards, like what you would find in a mass produced product for his taillights and is currently working on making board for to have an LED lit cluster among a few other projects.

 

i may just end up getting something generic like this http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102843

[RobertISaar]

yeah, proto board. wonderful stuff. looks like the long dimension could match the GP taillight sizes nicely as well.

[iroc2]

exactly me thoughts. that and just trim to fit, make smaller panels for the curve around from the back to the side