One of the first things I did to the car was to install under-dash lighting. The actual LED strips weren’t anything special; they’re aqua in colour and fade in and out with the dome light built into the car (simply wired up to the generated signal provided by the BCM). After a few years, including the cold winters, the LED strips started to shed their waterproofing, crack, and just flat out fall apart. Due to this fact, I have wanted to replace them for some time now; the only problem I had was the replacements themselves.
Getting a replacement strip wasn’t really the issue as I could just order the same ones from the same supplier; however, they are pretty expensive for what they are. I had thought that maybe I could get a bulk deal of some sort and save a bit as I wanted to add more lighting elsewhere. After contacting the supplier, my savings still weren’t that impressive, so I started to look elsewhere in an attempt to cut out the middleman. This proved to be even more difficult as I have now found out, aqua coloured LEDs are quite hard to come by, let alone LED strips.
During my hunt, the only LEDs that I found that had the correct colour (or close to it) were produced by Lumex – product number: SSL-LX5093TC. I had two issues with this: the first being that they are regular through-hole LEDs, and the second being that they sell for an average of $1.00 CAD or so from places like Digi-Key, Mouser, etc. Feeling somewhat defeated, I revisited an idea I had previously to fix my dilemma: RGB LEDs.
I had initially dismissed the thought of using RGB LEDs because I knew that the strips were expensive, and I didn’t want to overcomplicate a simple repair; however, without having many other options, I decided to entertain the idea. After a bit of price shopping, I came to find that I could get an excellent deal on some LEDs – waterproof too! I was blown away by how much cheaper RGB LEDs had become over the years; I even found out that there was a better waterproofing style that wouldn’t experience the same faults my previous strips had encountered.
These new strips are housed in a silicone tube completely shielded from the environment, while my previous strips were only coated in a type of epoxy on the emitting side. Since the new ones are made from silicone, they won’t crack and fall apart like their epoxy counterparts. As a quick price comparison, the aqua-only led strips (with inferior waterproof capabilities) cost $7.98USD per foot. The more durable RGB strips cost $0.86 USD – a no-brainer. I then quickly placed an order and received them within a week or so. During this time, I started to plan everything out; things like where to use them, how I was going to drive them, functions, controls, etc.
When I was done planning, I had figured out that I would like lighting in five different areas: under the dash, under the seats in the rear, under a panel, in the door handles, and in the speakers. At this time, I still had remains of my EL wire project in a few of the places where I wanted to place LEDs. Originally, I was going to tie the left and right sides together and control the five main channels individually, but then I thought, ‘what if the LEDs aren’t consistent between the left and right sides?’ I then also figured that I might as well go all out and control each channel individually – I’m now at ten channels. In addition to this, I also wanted to control my existing EL wire; add on another five channels. This means that I need to effectively manage five EL channels and thirty LED channels as each RGB strip has three channels each 10 strips \times 3 channels = 30. With the planning done, my next step is to design both the hardware and software.
