Leads were passed through the engine firewall and snaked to the front of the vehicle. For the LED positive and negative leads I chose 18G automotive wire which was inserted into plastic automotive conduit and wrapped with electrical tape for water resistance. To tap power, I used a fuse tap purchased from the local autoparts store. I wanted the DRLs to come on/off with the ignition, so I tested several fuse positions with a voltmeter to find one that worked that way. Since I wanted to have access to the dimming feature via the attached potentiometer, I ended up tapping power from inside the car. There were two fuse boxes I could potential tap power from, one inside the engine bay near the battery, and the other on the drivers side inside the car. I'm no mechanic or electrical wizard so mounting and wiring the DRLs took some serious planning and inspection of the engine bay/interior fuse box. Next post will have the install onto my car and some photos of it in action. Since this was designed as a press fit (very tight), I had to make sure everything was right since it would be nearly impossible to remove. The last thing was to install the plexiglass front cover. Since the heatsink fins on the backside would not catch much air passing through, I also mounted smaller heatsinks along the top and sides to improve cooling. The heat sink was attached using both arctic adhesive (in the middle) for heat transfer, and JB Weld along the perimeter for extra strength. Additionally, smaller 14x14 heatsink squares were attached to the top and sides. A heat sink was cut from a piece salvaged from an old battery backup and glued to the back side of the DRL. To prevent shorting, Kapton tape was added to the bottom side which sits flush against the emitters.Įven running at ~250mA/emitter, the DRLs got warm after a short while so required some additional heatsinking. They were made slightly larger than the emitter dome, and flared out at the top. Holes were drilled to match the spacing of the e mitters. The “reflector” was fabricated out of the same aluminum flat bar. Wire holes were drilled out the back side.Įmitters mounted onto aluminum flat bar and wired in parallel Additional thermal paste was used between the emitter strip and aluminum housing. The emitter “strip” could now be slid down into the DRL housing. After reflowing onto the boards, 8 emitters were secured to a piece of aluminum flat bar with arctic paste and soldering in parallel. The end caps were made from aluminum flat bar stock cut and secured with JB Weld. The DRL housing was constructed from aluminum U-channel cut to size. I also needed to electrically isolate the center solder pad with kapton tape as the Nichia 119 + and - pads would overlap causing a short. The boards need to be sanded down slightly to fit inside the aluminum U-channel. Reflowing the emitters was done on a hot plate. I could always throttle the output back using the wired pot if needed. I did some initial bench testing and found this would be plenty of output to be visible without blinding oncoming traffic. The Flexblock can supply a maximum of 2A, so each LED would be getting 250mA. The plan was to use 8 x Nichia 119 for each DRL wired in parallel with the two sets wired in series (2s8p).
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