Custom Gauge lighting, now in color! |
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Custom Gauge lighting, now in color! |
timothy_nd28 |
Jul 2 2013, 04:00 PM
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#1
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 2,299 Joined: 25-September 07 From: IN Member No.: 8,154 Region Association: Upper MidWest |
First I would like to thank Kent (76-914) for introducing me to Al's wife Shirlee. She was extremely helpful and sold me all of Al's leftovers. Today, I received a huge box filled with led's, cannibalized gauge housings and a very touching note from Shirlee. I also noticed a dismantled tachometer that Al was working on. I was taken back and felt very sad seeing this tach. You could see all the tedious prep work that Al did, but sadly he wasn't able to complete his masterpiece.
I was determined this afternoon to pick-up where Al had left off, in his honor. This thread is broken up in 3 parts. The first part is intended to show everyone how Al achieved his multicolor gauges. The 2nd part is a "how to" to make your gauges into any color you wish. The last part is another "how to" but taking our gauges to a whole new level. As you will see, my design could have a back light color background in any color that you can think of. My uncle has designed a neat little circuit that works in tandem with the RGB color controller. The circuit senses the tach wire, and changes the color of the back-lighting of all gauges to yellow at a certain rpm, then red at another certain rpm. It is fully customizable as you can set the when yellow comes on, as well as the red. There is another input on this circuit board which turns all the gauges to red when triggered. I thought we could use this special input for the low fuel light, or as a fan belt warning for the 911 types. Perhaps the special input could be hacked into a radar detector, many possibilities. Yellow and redline lights again are fully adjustable via a potentiometers, also this circuit will work for any 4-6-8 cylinder engines. With my last how-to topic, I received many messages from folks that didn't feel comfortable doing this to their own gauges. I have done enough of these in which I feel comfortable. If you're one of these folks, send me a PM and I'll do this conversion for you. For me, it's a 1.5 hour process, but it may take longer for someone that has never done something like this before. I'll try to make this write up detailed as much as possible. |
timothy_nd28 |
Jul 2 2013, 04:03 PM
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#2
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 2,299 Joined: 25-September 07 From: IN Member No.: 8,154 Region Association: Upper MidWest |
Go ahead and test these lights before putting the gauge back together.
Let us now turn our attention to the controller. I have found a good cheap Chinese RGB controller that will work with our car. Readily available on eBay for 10 bucks, and the best part, it has memory. It would really suck to turn on the headlight switch and have your gauges go into some disco mode! You pick the color that you like best, and it retains that same color the next time you pull the headlight switch. Here's the controller: Here is a small sample of colors you can choose from. The pictures don't do these any justice, they look awesome in person. You can make any color, if you don't like any of the presets, you can manually adjust the red, blue and green to find the color you like best. They even have pink for the unicorn lovers (IMG:style_emoticons/default/drunk.gif) Set the color, and throw the remote into the glovebox and forget about it. For the purist, I think this color matches are original incandescent lamps. |
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