that is definitely one of the worst ideas, ever. LOL

 

Its actually good fun! I enjoy the making of the piece more than the use of them. You may wish to checkout "Eagle" - Its a pretty good, free PCB designer.

You can download it from http://www.cadsoftusa.com/

I'm going the fully programmable route, addressing each led individually. Should be good fun

 

theorie i love the design you have made it looks amazing tbh and the hard work you have put into this and the research, you have made this into a realy good post
was wondering if you could send me your schematic and what software did u use every time iv tryed a software i cant get it to make round PCB's.

the reason i ask is im a bit of an electronics nerd and would like to make this and was thinking of intergrating it with an arduino or as ceylon i think it was said maybe a PIC.
Regards
Gavin

 

hey! I saw this just today...I doubt it is what you're looking for but...I thought it was still a very interesting design!

http://minkara.carview.co.jp/image.a...82529%2fp1.jpg

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05-VErZVE0

 

^wow, that's disgusting. i mean, maybe for a pace car or something, but i could never see anyone driving a car with tails/signals that did that. lol

alrigt so my LEDs came saturday. unfortunately the idiots set the wrong ones. they sent LEDs with clear lenses even though i ordered ones with red lenses. my copper clad laminate came also. hopefully this week i can try to make a couple of PCBs.

 

red LED tail lights look sick...

 

Look forward to the progress Tom.

 

great thread, thanks for putting in all of the work, been wanting to do this for years but have never been electronics savvy.

Keep up the good work.

 

I've noticed a lot of cars lately where they don't even have orange for the turn signals, just more red.

What are your thoughts on that?

 

Are you clowns trying to make a pinball machine or tail lights? Just about all the designs I've seen besides toms looks dated or like they should be on the side of an arcade game.


cloud, personally I like the orange turn signals. But everyone has their own personal taste. I'm sure some people would make them blue if they weren't worried about getting pulled over.

 

well i've contacted the place that sent me the wrong LEDs. hopefully those fools get their act together and get me the right LEDs, stat!

had a busy weekend with the girl. went out boozing with my gf, goodfellafd3s and his girl. wife swap ftw! haha yeah just kidding.

back into the daily grind though so hopefully tomorrow night i'll get a chance to make some PCBs! progress update as it comes along...

anyway, here's a flick of what i got in the mail saturday.

 

Quit the partying an get to what is important: satisfying our needs for LED taillights!

 

ya seriously Drinking can wait! although I have no room to talk, cause I drink constantly. I'm excited to see your results!

 

already posted... whoops

 

so....i'm almost done redesigning my pcb layout.

decided to go with a slightly different design using less resistors. also throwing in some 1amp 12v-output voltage regulators. if this calculator is working correctly, each 60-LED array will only draw 240mA.

i made a shopping list for my girlfriend so she can pick up the rest of the parts i need from radioshack when she's in manhattan today. [url=http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/explosion-on-sixth-avenue[/url]hopefully the store doesn't blow up[/b] like one did last week when she was picking up the PCB etching solution (luckily she went to a different radioshack, like 4 blocks away...lol)

i don't feel like waiting to exchange my clear-lens LEDs for red-lens, and since i'm going to try mounting them behind the colored insert for the first prototype, it doesn't really matter anyway.

gonna try to make some PCBs tonight after work, hopefully.

 

I poked around the website some. It appears that the video above of the twintop car is in demo mode. They have a couple of controller boxes that facilitate this sort of thing.

"If you are interested in as soon as it can be a variety of software on the controller in this way, please contact
To commercial customers will not only provide the ideas!"

 

hey goodfella. fix the link in my post!

 

That's one hell of an explosion:

 

Mind if I throw my 2 cents in?

I always thought LED tails were a cool idea, especially the direction you are going with them, but my biggest personal complaint with all the kits/services that were out there is, regardless of how they were done, you always saw the LED seperation. There was no smooth 'ring of light' per se...

Something I haven't seen anyone do yet is borrow the concept from 'angel eyes' and implement them into tails. There is a plethera of writeups online on how to make your own rings and lighting elements with LEDS. And the best part? The rings can be sized accordingly for 99 spec lights (brake rings slightly larger then turn rings) and only take 1 or 2 LEDS as apposed to a full boards worth


Thoughts?

 

I doubt they would be bright enough for brake lights, but would be fine for running lights. I've seen a couple of conversions like this, but on skylines (Common over here ), comes out okay.

 

Well my understanding from what I've read in the thread is Theorie is making the circuit board hollow in the middle to still allow the stock brake light to illuminate the housing when brakeing, and the outter ring is for running lights.

Maybe I got the wrong impression...

 

My bad, when you said "brake rings slightly larger then turn rings", I assumed you meant using these as break lights too

 

Well this is interesting...

I've been slowly...very slowly working on the same thing. Your ideas are very much in line with mine. The only real differences being a single outer ring, but with many, bright LEDs to make more of a solid ring and the same to fill in the center. Other projects and hobbies have taken up my time. And your schematic is much better than mine.

To BlinD26's point.

I've seen that in OEM solutions. That would be something, but a little harder to fit/implement. It shouldn't be that big of a deal. I agree that it would be more for running lights, not brake. The one downside being the break in the ring where the LEDs themselves are.

theorie,

I'm very interested to see how the final product looks. Nice work so far.

 

I was refering to on a 99 spec converted light/real one, the actual circle is a smaller diameter on the turn signal vs the brake lights

Bad wording hehe