Vent Lights, A little project Options

[Ruroniarc]

I wasn't able to take any pictures while I was doing this because I did it at midnight in a rush, but here is the final product. Sorry about the blurry pictures too, it was taken in the dark. Trust me, they look better in real life.



For this project I pulled 12 volt power off of my cigarette lighter and put a 10mm Super Bright Blue LED in each of the four vents. Just drilled a hole and taped them in. Then ran leads from all LEDs back to my power source. I wired them in series because each LED pulls 3 volts, and I didn't need resistors that way. I also hooked it up to a switch so I can turn it off when I want to. If I didn't have the lights on, you would never know they were in there. It looks really cool at night when I'm driving around. I just thought the interior could use a little extra light, mine seemed to be a little dull a night, and I would find myself turning on my dome lights to do just about anything. Now I got that nice blue light. =D

My next project is to do the heater controls and then the gauges in blue. Already ordered the LEDs. =D

This post has been edited by Ruroniarc: Jun 30, 2009 - 6:29 PM

[tonytutino]

how do you wire them in a series? i wired these as well ,but incorrectly apparentyl. 2 of mine burned out already!

[pittfirefighter]

if you buy the prepackaged ones, they are for 12v... so wire them in parallel... which means all the positives go together and all the negatives go together... if they are just the LED's by themself... they wire them in series... 3V each x 4 = 12V draw... that means that negative goes to positive, negative goes to positive... making a chain
tony... if you wired them wrong then they would have burned out immediately... a 3v LED with 12V going into it won't last more than a second... you just bought low quality LEDS

This post has been edited by pittfirefighter: Jul 3, 2009 - 4:18 AM

[skogs]

you'll need a small resistor anyway, even if all the led's sums up to 12v. The resistor is needed to limit the current, the led will die if resistor is omitted.

http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz

This post has been edited by skogs: Jul 18, 2009 - 5:20 AM