Matt.

That's exactly where I am at the moment... I'm just trying to come up with a good way of tinting the inside of the buttons. I've tried a few things, but I want a nice even colour rather than bright/dull spots. What did you use?

Just an update for anyone interested... I finally got around to replacing the surface-mount LEDs for the steering wheel controls. I changed them from the dodgy and barely visible dull green lights (left image) to a nice crisp white light (right image). If anything they're now a little too bright, but these were the least bright LEDs I could get. Looks pretty good at night :)

I've had to miss everything so far this weekend cause of an exam this morning... keen to get into it now though! Can someone post here if you all end up doing something after dinner tonight? Otherwise I'll see you all in the morning for the 9.30am brissy cruise.

The 7 LED ones looked really good... white with a slight blue tinge. Loved em. But, they barely lasted a month. Maybe 6 weeks. Watch this space - I WILL solve this problem in the June/July uni hols. 4 weeks off to tinker with all things electrical. The SMD style ones did slightly better. They didn't have the nice bluish tinge like the others, but at least they made it a bit longer.

I am yet to find a style of LED that lasts more than a couple of months in my Aurion. That said, it seems that others are having more luck than me. The plan is to find out what it is exactly that is failing, and why it is failing, then fix this problem for good. My habit for going over the top with all things electronic is making me think about putting some sort of simple voltage buffer circuit that will isolate the parkers and allow me to properly regulate the current. LEDs shouldn't fail so quickly! I often wonder if it's worth it, but the stock bulbs just look so dodge.

As a follow up to my last post... first lot of bulbs blew within a month, so I put in the second lot. Now one of them has blown too. Dodgy! I'm going to investigate this further, starting with checking the current delivered to the parker bulbs, then checking what has actually failed in the bulbs (i.e. diodes, resistor, tracks on tiny PCB). Not holding my breath on improving the longevity of these bulbs.

Happy to help if you need a hand mate, but as with Daryl, time will be the issue. Next free weekend is May 15th :)

Looking forward to some good photos when you do get the chance. Saw your car parked out the front of your work the other day (remember, I walked in and said "Hi Steve, car looks good" and you shot me that who the hell are you and how do you know me look...) Front grill looked sweet. So did the blacked out headlights.

I think you're ready :)

More of the same from me... lights, and more lights. Boring, I know, but it's all the budget will allow at the moment. Today was the shifter. Started with the dodgy stock green, then went to red. Couldn't decide if I liked it, so then came the bluish white. Exciting, right?

Just a bit of information for anyone keen to see the difference in a few of the common options available for LED parker replacements... I have tried both of these bulbs in my parkers: There is a bit of difference between the two. The 7 LED sytle are a slightly blue-ish white, while the 25 SMD LED style bulbs are a very clean white. Perhaps not so surprisingly, the 25 SMD style bulbs are quite a bit brighter. I've only had the bulbs in for a short time, so I can't really comment on the longevity of either bulb - but I've installed the 7 LED bulbs in my car and the 25 SMD style bulbs in a mates on the same day, so I'll let you know whose fail first! Anyway, here are a few pictures for you to compare. My car (the lighter "reef" blue one) has the 7 LED bulbs and the other one has the 25 SMD LED bulbs. It would have been better if the photos were at night, but my mate had to be somewhere.

Why would these fail on rough roads? As Daryl suggested, I'm more concerned with the quality of the load resistors inside these (and all eBay bought) LED bulbs, but I don't see what effect rough roads should have... unless you're worried about the solder joins shaking loose? I know it's illegal to have them on in normal driving conditions. It's also illegal to install aftermarket HIDs without the proper extra "bits" to go with them , but I don't want to debate that here. They cost me very little and on the odd occasion when I want to turn on all of my front lights, my illegal white fog lights will match my illegal 6000K HID low beams quite nicely :)

There are a few things that can make things a bit easier. Firstly, FLUX IS YOUR FRIEND! This helps spread the heat from the point of contact with the soldering iron to the entire "blob" of solder. But secondly (and probably most importantly) adding fresh solder on top of the old solder helps a lot! The fresh solder melts much more readily, and once it is molten it then provides a much larger spread of heat to the old solder. In any case, it's going to be a bit of fiddling around to see what works. Experimenting is half the fun anyway, right? What did you study at QUT? I used to study there...

I'm fairly sure the autome unit allows you to reprogram the function of the buttons, but not change the expected input resistances associated with them. I was more thinking of cutting a wire and putting a resistor in series to effectively raise the resistance of all buttons by the same constant value as it seems that the unit struggles to distinguish between small resistances - so hopefully bumping them all up a bit will move them into a better range (it's really just a big guess...). As for the LEDs, I've done a reasonable amount of soldering with PCBs (student electrical engineer) and I intend on doing it using the awesome equipment in the labs at uni. I'm considering either "borrowing" some LEDs from uni or even desoldering some off some spare T10 style SMDs that I have lying around. It'll just be a bit of an experiment I suppose :)

Ok, here's a night time shot. Obviously only one side is fitted so you can get a bit of a new vs old comparison. You can see that the LED does not throw the light as far as the standard yellow bulbs do, but I assure you the light is just as bright/intense to look at, so they look great! I'm really happy with the brightness and colour, the only thing that remains to be tested is the durability.

So far so good. They look great in the day... super white and equally as bright as the stock bulbs (I've only put one side in so I can take a comparison photo tonight). I'll let the pictures do the talking later tonight. Obviously I can't comment on durability yet, but they were only cheap so it won't be too devastating if I don't get too long out of them.

A quick (but not so exciting) teaser: More pics to come when it gets darker.

How much mate?

Since installing my Autome sat nav head unit, all of my steering wheel controls remained working except the Prev/Next buttons. These buttons do still work... the head unit just can't tell the difference between the two buttons (so they either both skip to the next track or both skip to the previous track, depending on which way you program them). I have pulled apart the controls and measured the resistances of each of the different buttons: Volume Down: 3.11 kOhm Volume Up: 1 kOhm Prev Track: 330 Ohm Next Track: Short Circuit (no resistance) <-- I did not expect this... My plan is to cut one of the wires and put a resistor in series in this circuit, essentially raising all the resistances by a constant value (I'm thinking a 330 Ohm resistor should do it), in the hope that the head unit will then be able to tell the difference between all of the buttons. Before I do this, I was just wondering if anyone else has had a go at fixing this in the past, and if so, what did they do?? On a side note... I'm also going to replace the dodgy dull green LEDs that light up the steering wheel buttons with some brighter white LEDs. These are quite small surface mount style LEDs, so they might be a bit fiddly. We'll see how I go. I'll take some pictures and post a bit of a guide if anyone is interested.

No, really... where???? Scratch that... thanks Ash.

Where's Dee's work? I'm in tonight... finally.

I bought 6 of them. I also bought a few other types to try out, but these were the first to arrive. I'll do a bit of a photo summary when everything arrives. I've gotten much better at changing them now. First one took about half an hour with a fair bit of abuse being thrown around, other side of the car took about 2 minutes.

I got them from eBay. They took about two weeks to get here though...

Small update. Today I went from this: To this: Foggies are still yellow. I have white LEDs for them and 6000K HIDs for my low beams on their way. I had also done this awhile ago...

Spotted a black Aurion Sportivo near Lutwyche yesterday. They had removed the rear spoiler, completely blacked out the tail lights, had what looked to be 19" black rims with a red stripe around the edge of them and painted red calipers (well I assumed they were painted...) Looked pretty sweet. It was going the other way, otherwise I would have taken a picture...