Blue LEDs

[Jarrett]

I need to know who all has done the blue LED conversion into their Accords. I'm trying to work on the climate control right now and I am having problems everywhere. I bought 2 extra units so I could practice and on the first one, only the bottom string of LEDs lit up when connected to a 9-volt battery. On the second one, I didn't put any new LEDs into it just to keep a constant(the 9-volt battery) and none of the LEDs light up. I'm thinking since the whole circuit board was designed to run with LEDs from the factory, I don't need a resistor added anywhere, even on the perf board strips I added. I'm going to rewire everything without the resistors anywhere and plug it into the car and see if it works there. That's the power source that matters seeing as it's the one I'll be relying on once everything's in the car. Also, how do you remove the little colored lenses that are behind every switch? Do they just pop out or do you have to wrestle them out or what? Help drastically needed!

[accordztech]

cpmike to the rescue....he will know

[cp[mike]]

lol, thanks...

jarrett, you know the 8 spots where there are stock green LEDs? those you can pull out and install blue LEDs without worrying about resistors.

and you made a comment about the board being made to run all LEDs... it wasnt. it was made to run the 8 LEDs mentioend above, but the faces of all the buttons are all lit up by those 2 small twist-base bulbs, which run on 12 volts, which is WAY to much to run an LED off of. if you wire it up w/out resistors youll get a bunch of nice looking burnt LEDs and a really crappy smell. also i wouldnt recommend using a 9v battery to test... just wait till u can plug it into the car.

when you mount the LEDs to the strips of perfboard, each one needs to have its own 560ohm resistor attached to one of its leads... no exceptions (at least in this case).

and about the colored lenses, they are kinda hard to get out... you need to pop the button face off from the front to get to it, but every time i tried (8 times) i broke the little clips that held it on, which wasnt too big a deal because the buttons ended up going back on well enough. but you dont need to worry about the plastic lenses, because they are blue... which is the color youre aiming for. well except for the defroster button... which is amber... you cant do anything about that, its stuck being amber. i had to put a white LED behind it to get it to light up.

[Jarrett]

That's right, I totally forgot about those two being 12 volts. Well, why does every positive lead on an LED need to have a resistor? Hasn't the electrical charge already been reduced by 560 ohms? Just a preventative measure or what? Well, I'm making the defroster red so I don't know what the resulting color will be but I'm pretty sure it will be something I can relate to "warm" though so it'll be fine. This thing is taking so long though that I probably wouldn't mind if all of them turned out brown. Thanks though.

[cp[mike]]

here you go..

[Jarrett]

Well, there's my problem right there. I was wiring them in series, not parallel. Well, while I'm on the topic, do you have a diagram for the gauge cluster? I'm in the process of doing it now but I have no idea which is positive or negative. I'm going to get new gauges today so I can have some in the car while I work on it but when I was doing that circuit board on top I put LEDs into the factory bulb holders and back into the board and plugged it into the car to see if any lit up and none of them did. I know that's a bad idea with no resistors but I figured 2 seconds wouldn't hurt. None of them are burned out either. I figure some might be in backwards but not all of them. What am I doing wrong? Criticism GREATLY appreciated.