my DRL's are done..... (there will be pics!)

[britlude]

My DRL story... ('daylight running lights'... for the search engine as DRL is too short!)

Jumping on the bandwagon, I’ve wanted to integrate some DRL’s onto my car, mainly because it’s my car and I can, but just lately there has been an increase in people seemingly not seeing my car, so anything to help!

I’ve seen various threads on various sites, and to be quite honest they look a bit ‘add’-on’. So taking advantage of the indicator/side light units on the pre-facelift front I started looking for stuff! Donor lamp units, so I can return it all to stock easily if need be, and something to use as the DRL’s themselves.


I wanted to go DRL, but keep the indicator facility as well, as is required over here. The US ones I’ve seen delete the indicators completely, or use a flashing DRL for the indicator function. That’s all very well on a ‘50’s Austin, but no good for a UK NSX.

I sourced some donor lamp units, one from this site, the other dragged from the bottom of a pond and sent over from the U.S of A…



yes, it is covered in ginger rust on the inside of the lens....

Then lamps lenses were split from their bases, easy on the pond-life one, a total pain on the british one. Referring to the NSXprime threads, it’s implied they are glued together, and a good dunking in hot water will soften the glue to split them. However, I found no glue, but what looks more like the parts were ultrasonically bonded… that is, they were held together, then ultrasonics (micro vibrations) applied, which caused the interface between the bits to ‘shuffle’ melting the plastics together. So the pond life one fell apart (long term dunking obviously does something!), the british one had to be cut apart with a thin dremmel blade. Just as well I got very used ones! the pond-life lense cleaned up beautifully (apart from the crack!) and interestingly pretty much all the chrome plating on the reflector had disappeared!


On the DRL front, pretty soon into my search I found these, cheap on ebay, with integral indicators, so worth a look….



…9 DRL lamps, surrounded by 16 amber LEDs… all sounds good and the internet pics look ok, but we all know they sometimes don’t look right on the computer.

In the flesh (or plastic) the white lights are good, nice and bright, with integral lenses, but the indicators are very poor, ok as a gimmick, and probably ok at night, but no good in the daylight. The other problem is that of the lights position on the car, the front indicators/sides are at quite an angle to the front of the car, and this will mean the DRLs will point out sideways, not forwards as they should. So back to square one, but it has shown me ‘superflux’ LEDs! It was a shame they were no good, as once trimmed, they fitted in the housing quite nicely.

ho hum, to be continued....

[britlude]

Next on the list was this type of DRL, a suitable size, and the angles are far better than the first ones. An added bonus was the lights came with a dimming circuit to reduce the light output when the headlights are switched on. A feature I will be needing later!








I could just put on the drls, and call it done, but just to complicate things, I want the lights to still be used as sidelights (if the car has to be left in a ‘needs sidelights’ place), so need to factor that into the control circuit. The DRLs, because they are next to the indicators, need to dim when the indicators are used, and not just when the indicators are on, but for their ‘off’ cycle too… so the lamp isn’t just alternating between bright white/ amber, but dim white, with a flashing amber! Oh, and only dim on the indicating side…. Oh, and the lights need to dim when the headlights go on! Simples!


I also ordered a shed-load of superflux amber LEDs for the indicators.
These are low current items, but with reasonable light output, and a wide output angle. Lots of high brightness LEDs gain their brightness rating by having a very narrow viewing angle, not a lot of help for indicators!. High current Luxeon LEDs would have been nice (as I’ve built lights for the hotrod, and know they are BRIGHT!) but space is an issue. Also, I’ve tried to avoid the ‘dotty’ look of widely spread lights by using more of the lower power LEDs. The added bonus is no heatsink issues to worry about!


And the designing begins!!!!

[mutley]

As always, I'll be following this thread very closely, Oh and I hope you will be ready for some orders once you have mastered them :-)


Jim

[britlude]

the continuing story......

First off…. LED spacing….. tried different spacings to see what I could get away with, as expected, the closer the better…. (sometimes i wonder why i even bother!)



To mount them I was going to use strip-board, but there’s a curve in the light…. And not a lot of clearance on the outboard end…. So a perspex frame was cut and drilled to take the LEDs….



So, the plan was to have a line of DRLs in the middle of the light, with a line of bright LEDs around this. Ok, a little bit Audi, but how it had to be with the room available. I wanted to use the first DRLs i found as the lens/support was clear with a black back cover. I had intended to use this without the black cover, and have the amber flooding through all of it, making for a fuller amber lamp. Alas it was not to be!

So, to mount the LEDs I made up a Perspex/lexan/clear-plastic-kicking-around-the-garage frame suitably drilled and at the same time this was to provide support for the DRL unit…. Something like this…



I wasn’t worried about the differing curves as it will all be inside the original lens when it’s all together! (and a sneaky peak behind of the relay based circuit design required to do the dimming/switching i wanted, and an early strip-board layout!)

Anyway, a load of soldering later I had something that looked like this…



ta-da!!

[britlude]

A quick mock up on the car with a battery pack looked like this….

the drl/sidelight…


indicator on it’s own (ie. if hazards are on….)


and both… (DRL is dimmer in this one compared to the first pic above, as it should be with the indicator on!)


ok, not so bright as the original straight on (no surprise there as it’s up against a 21W bulb and reflector!) But the light is as good/better from other angles


all looking good so far. What it has shown if the LEDs are sensitive to the positioning between them and the original lens, as the front nsx lens has 5 bar lenses moulded into it. Also now the indicator extends further to the outside than the original.

So looking good… but could be better!

Back to the garage!!!!

[britlude]

As always, I'll be following this thread very closely, Oh and I hope you will be ready for some orders once you have mastered them :-)


Jim

at least you'll see what happened to your lights... the broken one was the development mule, so i could work out just what needed chopping out!

[britlude]

So back in the garage…

well, I can see a huge gap on the inside of the light just begging to have LEDs in it! However there isn’t a lot of height between the lamp housing and lens cover, so a bit of a file of the housing to grab another mm or 2 height, and then an array of LEDs glued together (and soldered as flush as I could get) add another 20 LEDs to the count….



fills it out quite nicely, but 3 of the original LED’s are shielded by the DRL unit, so another tweak looses these, and bulks up the LED count at the outboard end! (BTW the black line across it is an elastic band holding it together!)

Here’s what I mean…
Before on top and after below


the top version 1 has 5 columns, the new only 4. It shows up in the above pic, but from a different angle they vanish!


so I swapped them out, and bulked up the outboard end. I could have left them and added the extra LEDs, but I’d ‘only’ ordered 200 and was running out!!!!

I would have liked to do the same at the outboard end, but there’s not enough room between the housing and lens cover, as it tapers through its whole length, just to be awkward! the difference in the LED intensity is down to the distance from the front lens cover. these pics were taken before everything was finally aligned and glued in!

Getting there tho!

[britlude]

As I want this to be a plug and play(ish) change, I fitted load resistors to make up for the lower current required for the LEDs vs the 21W bulb. A 50W aluminium cased resistor was used, with a piece of aluminium to give a little bit more heatsink capacity. As the resistor is at less than half its rated capacity, and it’s only used with a a 50% duty cycle it shouldn’t give any issues! Also you get to see a bit of the LED array…


the eagle eyed will notice that there’s no Perspex/lexan/clear-plastic-kicking-around-the-garage frame… after the initial try, it became apparent that the frame was blocking the LEDs at shallow angles, and, as I’m trying to utilise as much light from these LEDs as I can, it had to go!

Turns out I could have soldered them to stripboard after all! Still, live and learn! If it doesn’t work first time, bury the evidence and don’t tell anyone…. Oops!


You saw a sketch before of the control circuit, and with 5 relays, 6 diodes, 2 resistors and 2 capacitors I had a circuit that covered all I wanted….

1... sidelights can be switched on with ign off, and suitably dim

2... DRLs on with ignition

3... DRLs dim with sidelights (I chose sidelights as opposed to dipped beam as I already had a sidelight signal coming from the lamp units, the DRL’s are flipping bright at twilight, and I couldn’t be asked to find the dipped beam line!)

4... DRLs dim with the appropriate indicator! (for the whole cycle, not just the on bit! Like Audi A6, Range Rover Evoque, etc)

and put it all in a nice box!

As I mentioned earlier, the second set of DRLs came with a dimming circuit, in a nice potted sealed box. this was all very nice, but I only wanted 3 wires out of it, and it was too big. So where can you get a simple, small PWM (pulse width modulating) widget??? B&Q of course! What I use is the variable speed trigger off a cheap battery drill. Buy the cheapest variable speed 12v drill (I used one that cost a tenner last year) strip out the trigger, and you get a small adjustable transistor controlled dimmer unit. (also available at boot-fairs for about 3 quid!) The adjustable feature is an added bonus as it lets me tweak the dimmed light output in the real world!

Anyway, heres a pic of the circuit on stripboard with the DRL dimmer box beside the new drill based unit


the dimmer circuit only has 3 connections, 12v, 0v and the switched earth PWM line. the DRLs are connected to +12 and earthed through the PWM wire.

now just trim it down, add a connector and slap it in a box!


another quick mock-up, with the original style side light (LED bulb fitted) vs the DRL… quite bright!

[britlude]

So the final result… if you’ve got this far! I have got 2 lights, with connectors to fit in the stock bulb holders. The light units have an extra 6 way cable coming out of each, taking signals and ground from the lamp units to the control box, and return wires to the DRLs.

Here’s the control box mounted beside the fuse box where i've picket up the switched ignition line…. also I’ve added a switch on it to disable the DRL should I get the urge, or just in case at MOT time!


DRL on….


DRL in sidelight mode…



And a video showing the indicator/DLR interaction… if it works.. (dumped it on youtube... works/embeds from there!)



So, all in all it came out well, seems to work how I wanted it to. Now just to flatten out the dottyness…. I have found some polycarbonate holographic diffusing material, looks like it could do the trick (the sort of stuff BMW/Audi use) but 2 pieces big enough for the indicators are over £300…. So maybe not that then!

Lenticular lenses (like used in 3D birthday cards) have potential but give a line, maybe if I cross them?…. And then there’s the problem of finding some unprinted…..

[Senninha]

Fantastic results as expected really ... so thats two things I'd like to purchase from you now ....

regards, Paul