custom tail lights

[Fly Joe]

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

[CFI]

Personally I wouldn’t be interested. I have new tail light boards and LED bulbs. To me, that’s good enough.

[Timeless]

I'm with CFI on this. Updated boards with high quality LED bulbs work great and are reliable. Doubtful lots of owners would spend hundreds or more $$$ to have configurable taillight functions. Of course they may be a few owners wanting something custom but then the return on investment/development may not be there.

Would the juice be worth the squeeze?

[dn010]

I'm all for new and improved, but I too am very satisfied with my LED bulbs on my Grady boards. They're very bright and a big improvement over the incandescent original bulbs.

[bueller]

I've wanted to do something like sequential turn lights for a while. I'd be very interested in this but haven't the slightest idea what it's worth. Any idea what price point you'd be thinking about or shooting for? I could easily tell you if it seemed too high.

[Fly Joe]

Thanks guys,

your statements are much appreciated and they totally make sense.

We have discussed it further.

A much simpler and much less expensive option would be to activate just the outer indicator triangles with LED's but keep using the original boards with standard LED bulbs for all the original segments.
We would be able to implement the panic light, the sequential indicator, and the fog light function.
We would be unable to implement the configurable tail/brake lights though, as this would require "dual ligament" bulb sockets on the boards.

The modifications to the original lights would consist of cutting open the rear side of the outer turn signal triangle (or just a slot to bring the small board in) and could be done by the buyer. We would provide a youtube video and if helpful a cardboard template.

Here is a little animation how the sequential indicator would look like. As you can see, the inner segment lights up as a whole and the outer part is divided into two segments.
Please ignore the red segments, this animation is just about the turn signal.
What do you guys think?

59952

Hm, for some reason it is showing up as jpg, even though the file I uploaded is an animated .gif.
I will re-try tomorrow (it is midnight here and I have to work tomorrow...)

[Bitsyncmaster]

I always like seeing people developing new ideas. I like the idea of no sockets for the "bulbs". When you are thinking of selling a few probably to help fund your development costs you need to get an estimated price and put out feelers to see how many you will sell. I use a US board house for my PCBs and I would estimate your board cost and LED cost would drive this product cost pretty high since you will probably have about 100 LEDs on each board.

I did LEDs on my rear lights about 10 years ago and LEDs have improved so much that I would consider getting your units if they perform really good.

[Lukas]

I'm interested...but not keen on cutting into the original tail lights, since they are NLA!

Not sure if anyone is reproducing the housings since the originals are NLA? I do remember some projects for different tail light colors, but nothing seemed to eventuate.

I don't have the resources, but would love a custom integrated tail light housing and LED light board (not bulbs, but panel LEDs). Could be programmable for all sorts of patterns - sequential indicators, horizontal parking light signature (kinda like a Dodge Charger, except the center license plate section would be dark), fog lights, emergency stop. If LED panels, probably wouldn't need to be very deep.

Probs $$$ due to the work and materials involved though...housing, lenses, LED boards, programming.

[Mark D]

I also find this project really interesting but I'm hesitant due to the modifications required to the tail light housings. They were available NOS up until a couple of years ago when they went NLA on the DMCH store... I'm not sure if they are actually out of stock or if DMCH is just stockpiling parts for their new builds.

Either way, if this was a plug and play swap with an aftermarket lens/housing I'd be on board. I know you said it was outside of the scope of the project to develop a new housing but it seems like you'd really only need the outer half since the bulb sockets and reflectors would be getting cut out anyway.

I would think that one of the major vendors would have replacement tail light housings by now but the demand must not be there to justify the tooling cost. If there was an aftermarket housing available you could just buy a stock of those to modify and sell the LED boards pre-installed rather than having people send in their own housings or attempt modifications themselves.

[Nicholas R]

500 sets seems pretty lofty. I'm not aware of anyone that's made any custom DeLorean part that has sold numbers like that. Heck, just talk to Michael. He had automatic transmission filters made, a part that was desperately needed by the community, sold them for a very reasonable price, and they still didn't exactly fly off the shelf (to my knowledge at least -- Michael could certainly share more info).

Also, I hate to say it but if you're waiting on commitments to make a prototype, it wont happen. People need to see what it is. At least then you might get some impulse buyers. Also, just remember that until you take money, commitments are just words. Lots of people just like the idea of something being available, more than actually spending the money on it. This is especially true if people have to chop up their tail lights to make it work. Something like this needs to be a passion project more than a business venture. Best of luck, this sounds cool and I hope to see it work out :thumbup:

[SS Spoiler]

Passion project.....I like that

[Fly Joe]

We would be unable to implement the configurable tail/brake lights though, as this would require "dual ligament" bulb sockets on the boards.



I meant "filament" of course ;-p

Still trying to figure out why a .gif is converted to a .jpg by the forum software. Possibly there is a stone age file size limit that my gif exceeds.

You guys are right, the one and only thing that worries me is cutting the OEM lights. Without that I wouldn't even have asked if there is demand, we had just developed it and offered it. I know there would be demand for simple exchange lights that plug and play (and even look like the originals).

While RHS NOS is still available (not even too expensive from Houston - D-Go and DL.eu more expensive), LHS is not.
This is why we came up with the second idea, where only the outer triangle of the turn signal is opened from behind (whether a cut on one end is sufficient to push the small board in would be still to evaluate). This is a small modification which does not affect the OEM function at all. Even with a non working board inside one wouldn't see the difference.

On Facebook some people say they are happy with the OEM lights using LED bulbs. Anyone here who confirms this but at the same time would still like some additional function?

[Fly Joe]

After all your input here is a better overview of two options.
Option 2 ("reduced") would require very little modification of the tail lights as it would work almost entirely with the regular boards that you all have.

Please see table below (PLEASE SCROLL DOWN, for some reason all these blank lines appear above the table)
Features Option 1 (full) Option 2 (reduced)
turn signal incorporates second segment (outer triangle) X
X sequential ("running") turn signals X X foglight functionality included X X use of original connector ("plug and play") X X panic brake light (>6 m/s² braking leads to fast blinking) X Xuse of all three red sections for tail light (darker) and brake light (brighter) X--DMC Logo as tail light and/or brake light optional -- necessary modifications of OEM lights (lenses) heavy minor Full area equal brightness LED lights X only outer turn signal triangle; rest would work with standard boards and LED bulbsprice (pair LHS and RHS) approx. $
580 220 warranty 1 year X X
user configurable (switch) to behave 100% stock XX

Also here is an animation of the turn signal - externally stored .gif this time:
http://www.ranzomat.de/dmc/animation_nur_blinker_small.gif
Of course the blinking interval is too high, but it's just to demonstrate the sequential.

[Lukas]

Joe

Are you sure you can't make the tail light housings?!

[Ron]

(PLEASE SCROLL DOWN, for some reason all these blank lines appear above the table)Fixed that for ya...

That happened because the line breaks in the table's code were not stripped by a HTML compressor.
(They were only there to make the code easy to read while writing it etc.)

[Fly Joe]

Joe

Are you sure you can't make the tail light housings?!

Yes. This is a very difficult task. The housing itself, not a big problem - could be 3D printed even. But the glass segments can't be printed. Even with translucent filament it does not turn out clear afterwards. You always have the structure from the printing process.

We have 3D printed a plate to put between LEDs and glass to distribute the light evenly. It works perfect but doesn't look like the original lights where the tiny lenses in the glass lead to some kind of sparkling / local glowing depending on the angle from which one is looking at it. So we gave up that idea.

Here are some photos of the work so far.

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