Interior/Exterior :: How To - Waterfall Light

[GumbyLara]

What you will need:

1 - 5mm (color of your choice) LED
1 - 5mm LED Holder
1 - resistor (I went with 620ohms so it's dimmer and I used a 680ohm for the door handle LED mod! Super bright!)
Dremel or drill
Hot Glue Gun
Heat Shrink
Soldering Gun
Wire
Wire Splicers
Electrical Tape

First: Remove clock from headliner by pulling down on it, disconnect the wires.

Solder the resistor to the positive (longer wire) of the LED. Then solder the negative wire to the smaller end of the LED and heat shrink the wires separately.


Remove clock by unscrewing the two screws on the bottom side.


When looking at it with the clock in it, the LED has to be behind the connection of the clock. You will understand once you scroll down, but mark your spot and drill your hole a little bigger than the LED.


Put the LED holder in the hole


Make sure it fits in there nicely with the LED!



Hold the clock as if it were in the headliner straight. You will notice that the back of the clock slopes upward. This is why you need to drill the hole a little bigger so you can tilt the LED to face downwards toward the shifter/controls. Otherwise it points at the dash and the speedo and doesn't look right.




Put the clock back in and make sure it sits snug with enough room for the connector to fit back in place.


Hot glue around the LED so it will stay in place! (Any type of glue will work, I prefer hot glue because it is removable just by peeling!)


Get back to the car! You will see three wires in the connector. The middle wire is for brightness and will not work for any source of tap in. (Not sure what color it was) Connect the Positive wire to the Grey wire of the connector, then connect the Negative (Ground) wire to the Brown wire. Put the key in the ignition and see if it lights it! If so, tape it securely and snap it back in place! There ya go!

Wish you could see it better, but it actually shines just the right amount of light on the shifter, A/C controls, radio, E-Brake, and the cup costars. I think anymore light would distract me from driving. I will see if I can get a better picture soon! Good luck! Next is the Speedo/Tach/Clock color change to blue and white!


Note: This was done on a 2003 Mini Cooper S. Your wiring may be different.

[AggieMini11]

Good write up! I have never seen this before. Seems straight forward. post some better pics!

[GumbyLara]

Yeah, I am going to post some better ones tomorrow. Unless I feel like getting up to go take them now lol. Also thinking about maybe sinking it in a little so you only see the tip instead of the whole LED sticking out. I also bought some LED holders so I will probably do that and edit my write up as long as it still shows enough light.

Edit: Did it!

[NightFlyR]

I think I may give this a try and see if I can get it in Blue like my tach and speedo

[ImagoX]

Keep in mind that blue light DOES affect night vision, unlike red or amber. In other words, you might not be able to see at night quite as well with a blue light shining, even if it's dim.

Also note that I did something like this when I built a switch box for under my stock switch panel, and discovered two interesting things about LEDs:

1. You can use a Dremel or a piece of coarse sand paper to sand flat the rounded dome at the tip of the LED. The round shape in effect makes a tiny lens, focusing the light in a sort of circular shape. If you sand it flat, it forms more of a diffuser, spreading and softening the resulting light. Just be sure to stop sanding a few MM from the diode inside the plastic (looks like 2 tiny slivers of silver metal with a gap between them). Sanding the tip will also help with the "protruding LED" issue you're having - you can and off quite a bit of the LED before you get too close to the diode inside, eliminating 80% or 90% of the part that sticks out.

2. For a more "stock" look: if you use an amber LED, sand the tip and then coat the end with 3 or 4 coats of red Sharpie marker, the resulting reddish-orange is an almost perfect match for the MINI stock orange LEDs. I'd suggest this as an alternative to blue so you don't adversely affect your night vision.

Here's a shot of my car - I've replaced the cabin lights and foot well lights with blue LEDs and cold cathodes here (not lit when I drive so as to not spoil my night vision). Under the add-on switch box, I added 3 amber LEDS tinted with red Sharpie - those lights stayed lit whenever my instrument orange lights were on (spliced them into the power feed for the instrument lights).



Also, Oznium.com sells pre-resistored LEDs for a very affordable price (about a dollar apiece) - I buy them 10 or 20 at a time just to have the around in case I get an idea. More expensive than buying the LED, the resistor and the heat-shrink tubing, but it saves me the time of soldering and shrinking. Here's a link:

http://www.oznium.com/prewired-leds

The LED holders are available at Radio Shack - I think a pack of 5 holders costs like $2 tops. they're in with the LEDs in the drawers in the back of the store. If you plan to do LED lighting do yourself a favor and get like 10 packs - you never seem to have enough and run out halfway through a project. they're so cheap, I figure why not?

Thanks for the write-up! It's an interesting idea.

[GumbyLara]

Yeah, I replaced all my cabin lights with blue LEDs as well yesterday. Looks wayyy better. The waterfall light doesn't effect my night time driving at all, that's why I used a resistor that dimmed it quite a bit. And I will be changing my speedo to blue next week so it will match perfectly and blend in! Now that I have the LED holder, it looks like a nice finish since it's not sticking out so far, it also blocks the sides of the LED and only shows the tips how I wanted so you can't really see it. I was thinking about sanding them flat to produce more of a glow rather than a beam, but now it is directed exactly where I want it and it's perfect. And yes, if I could have bought them with the resistors and heat shrink already done I would have. But I didn't feel like waiting for shipping and I have an electronic shop down the street that has all of this stuff reallllly cheap. I got like 5 LEDs for a dollar!

[ImagoX]

Oh yeah - it's a lot cheaper to do them yourself, no doubt... I just figure why do the tedious stuff if you don't have to?

Also, the Oznium LEDS are resistored simply so that they shine at 100% brightness - the resistor is just there to keep the diode from overloading. A single LED wired in parallel only draws something like 3.2V and cars use 12V DC - without the resistor it would fail after only a few seconds.

If you wanted to dim the LED to less-than full strength (like it sounds like you did) then you'd have to add a bigger resistor than what Oznium uses.

Gotta disagree with one thing, though: any non-red light in your cabin DOES affect your night vision though, even if you don't notice it. It might only be a small drop, but if you combine that with, say, tinted windows then it could possibly spell the difference between noticing the car or pedestrian you're about to hit or missing them until its too late. This is why in the end I decided to NOT do the blue LED swap in my instruments - I read on too many VW forums about people getting headaches or missing dark objects at night that they speculated they might have seen if they'd not had bright blue instruments shining in their faces. They DO look cool, but there's a reason that most vehicles use red instrument lights (red doesn't affect night vision nearly as badly as other colors).

Probably not a huge deal, but it's worth mentioning. I still LOVE my blue cabin lights though - I get a ton of compliments on them.

[GumbyLara]

I do agree with you, compared to stock it does make a difference. It's a lot brighter so it probably does decrease the ability to see at night. But still looks good!

[xkot]

Those that do change to blue aredoing it for looks, if it Affects NV just turn the brightness down. Simple.