DIY Gauge Cluster LED Swap

[Ocelaris]

I was going to go through all the trouble of posting it twice, but it's a pain in the A$$ cutting it up into 10,000word sections, it's 23,000 words long. Enjoy.

http://www.7thgencivic.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=118566

[Suk02Si]

wow, very nice write up :D

[DavidT]

A++ for the effort. The writeup was thorough and descriptive. BUT, that's a WHOLE lot of work just to get the cluster to be a different color. Sounds more logical to just slap on a set of reverse indiglos or something...what about the rest of the dash and HVAC controls? :D I like my amberish red glow though, looks better than the blue or white IMO. Great job man. :cool:

[Ocelaris]

Somebody asked on 7thgen about this. For the a/c area check:

http://www.k-series.com/tech_detail.php?Tech_ID=EP_CON_LITE_SWAP


Originally posted by rizzah
with the LEDs how difficult is the install? I have a very novice knowledge of electrical work, can you install the LED's to change the tint of where the speedometer and such are too this way?

I wouldn't say that it's that hard, I didn't know much about electronics before I started tinkering with mine. I changed the bulbs behind my gauges to white LEDs, had to acetone off the orange tinting on the back of the face. Most people do them blue in that case, I was just going for the white/black theme.

Basically all you do is get to the PCB of the gauges or whatever (a/c buttons etc...) and there's two solder tabs where the bulbs would normally screw into, you figure out which is positive and which is negative, and then solder wires coming off of those. I used 24 SMD (surface mounted device) LEDs in strings hot glued behind the cluster for good coverage. The whole process for the gauge cluster took me about 6 hours to completion, but now for the rest of the life of my car I have the color I want... Cost me ~15$ in parts. I have a DIY on howto do the whole thing, I should post it on the forums, I was trying to get the whole thing hosted on k-series.com but that never turned out. Technically challenging, maybe, but definetly anybody can do it, just takes a little time and concentration.

I think alot of the reason people like "amber" is because it's the default spectrum of light bulbs, usually small dim ones, or if you dimmed a regular light bulb down to almost off you'd get the same spectral output. "Amber" really isn't a color anyways, there isn't a frequency on the color chart that denotes "amber" as you see in the picture below, incandescent light puts out a near 100% color rendering index, meaning it displays all colors of light, though incandescent bulbs put off a very warm color temperature, around 2500-3000 degrees kelvin.

The question really is, just because it was done in the past that way, now that we have a more precise, some might say better, should we continue doing it the same way? Before we couldn't display anything but "amber" now that you have a choice, do you like the way the bulbs look? Or would you prefer a different color. If you really want an "amber" color, there are LEDs that put out a much better imitation of the old amber/ fireplace glow sort of thing :-) It's really kinda funny to me, people have been familiar with "amber" fire color since we walked out of the jungles, now that we have semiconductor technology we don't wanna leave that color behind. Arguements could be made for either side, but I degress.

http://www.all4cell.com/graphics/led/spectrum.jpg
You can see in the above picture the visible spectrum, different colors have a certain frequency in nanometers (nm). LEDs put out a spike in one particular color, and very little in the others. Where as in the picture below you can see the straight line is an example of a regular incandescent light. Incandescent lights because they act by heating an object, give off a pretty smooth curve. LEDs, HIDs, and florescent lights give off a peaks because they are using certain chemicals stimulated by electricity, which give off specific wavelengths...

http://www.users.mis.net/~pthrush/lighting/incgraph.gif
Above you see the smooth line is a incandescent bulb.


Here you see a curve of a green LED that peaks at 504nm, a very green color.
http://nsr.mij.mrs.org/1/18/figure2.gif


Below you see a typical curve of a white LED, which is a misnomer of sorts, they are actually blue LEDs with phosphors (like what lines the inside of a florescent tube), that glows to approximate a regular curve. The benefit is that you get a high color temperature I think 6500*K is typical, which looks real "crisp" or "hyper-white" if you will.
http://www.trainweb.org/girr/tips/tips7/white_led_plot.jpg

The nice thing about LEDs, is that you can pick your exact shade by the "peak" color of the LED... as opposed to incandescent bulbs you will always get a wide range of color. The problem with just using the bulbs, is that say you want a blue from a incandescent bulb, you go buy a blue condom top and stick it on, and it's now 20% as bright as it was before... reason being you're filtering out 80% of the energy the bulb is putting out on colors that you're blocking. So with an LED, you put 100% of the energy into the color you want.


Indiglo = turquoise, not blue. I would only consider it logical to not exert the effort if you like the color you have. I don't like bulb colored tinting, a very coarse way of getting a color you want. Alot of people say they like the amber/firesque color, seems a conflict of interest to me. Same people who say they like the amber are the ones who won't/can't/don't want to etc... take the challenge of working on their lights. They do manufacture real "amber" shade LEDs if you really like that shade, I do suggest that a bulb choice is an inferior way of doing things.

[Mugen_EP]

Looks good but you lost me with all those graphs in shit. I could never pull that off.

[Brettnyt]

Looks nice... Lots of work tho...