Ivan's coupe: seeing RED

[cannabolic]

The man is back

[Ivan141]

Still haven't got the RGB led's in the mail, but here's a flattering shot of the hi-po led's i've been using for shits n giggles so far:


It looks very bright, it really isnt, but this is what I get with a 15sec exposure time on my camera. The top of the rpm and speed scales are relatively dimly lit with these LED's, if it doesn't get better with the diffuse LED's then I'm going to glue in some LED's inside the housing to fill in those areas.

Found a nice solution to control all the led's with a single IC that can drive 6 RGB led's using only a 2-wire SPI interface to my microcontroller so this is looking like it might actually turn out half decent.

Apologies for boring the non electronics enclined, but I needed to vent some minor nerdyness.

[Aram]

Looking cool!

You can wire up my dashlights (heater etc) if you want :-)

[cannabolic]

looks very cool

[Eifelaner]

i think so too, not a big fan of the green but i still give you

[Ivan141]

Eifelaner, the green is just because I had some green led's laying around, which also explains why the heat gauge is red (couldnt find another green led).

The end product I'm aiming for is fully colour and brightness adjustable (brightness hopefully controllable with the original dimming controls).
Maybe throw some shift light gimmick in there for the heck of it (flashing orange and red around shiftpoint). The main point I'm trying to stick to is making this all reversible, e.g. no mods to the original light fittings and cluster, aside from maybe some internal mods to add 2 extra led's to get every part to light up equally bright.

[Aram]

I would go crazy style, rev counter blue, speedo orange, fuel green etc. :-)

[Ivan141]

That's actually very difficult to achieve without extensive modifications.
Of all the backlit parts only the temp gauge has it's 'own' bulb, the main gauges have 3 bulbs, left, right and center. The right one lights the fuel gauge through a slit which I've opened up a little to get some more light in there.

What I would like a lot would be a separately coloured needle like you see on many modern cars. This is possible, but would also require remodelling the plastic light guides and developing a print with some SMD led's to light up the needle.

Anyone have a spare / broken cluster?

[Aram]

Would be cool indeed.
Maybe Len has a spare one?

[robokill]

len to the rescue.... how many do you need ?