Hey owners.
A friend of mine and I started discussing a project to build a full LED tail light that has configurable behavior.
We are both electrical engineers with a university Master's degree; my friend has been working as hardware and embedded systems developer for more than 15 years while
I have worked in automotive development for 13 years.
The specification would be as follows:
1.) Full area equal brightness LED lights
2.) Outer indicator triangle (remains dark in original tail lights) becomes part of the indicator
3.) Sequential indicator (two elements)
4.) automatic fog light if middle PIN leads 12V (PIN is unused in original setup) for the UK folks
5.) use of all three red sections for tail light (darker) and brake light (brighter).
6.) amber indicator LED's so faded out indicator lens is no issue
7.) Everything on one board and use of original connector ("plug and play")
3.) and 5.) could be separately switched off by user (with jumper or DIP switch; external switch could be optionally attached).
If 5.) is switched off, behavior would be as the original OEM board (two brake lights and in the middle the rear tail light)
8.) optional: Panic brake light (4 Hz blinking if deceleration is above 6 m/s²)
This would be measured with an accelerometer included in the board. Only the lateral deceleration would be taken into account.
Only problem with this feature (why I say it would be optional) is that EU regulation limit this function to speeds above 50 km/h
but vehicle speed information is unavailable at the tail light without considerable additional installation work.
We have made drawings and researched possible hardware components. We know we can do it. The decision whether or not we will, depends on the demand.
We would like to figure out for what price (if at all) there is sufficient demand, so if you could share your personal opinion about this it would be much appreciated.
Important to know is that we would have to use the original tail lights, as we want the rear of the car to look stock from outside but re-manufacturing their lenses is a project too big for us.
This means that the original tail lights would be cut to expose the outer (lens) section.
The modification of the lights could either be done by the buyer or by us for an additional payment (buyer would send in his tail lights and get them back modified)
We would give a 1 year warranty and 500 sets of boards would be produced, providing sufficient spare parts.
A similar project was already started a few years ago by Kevin but never left a very early prototype status:
http://dmctalk.org/showthread.php…
Johannes VIN 1111