repeater

I've got a good friend whose a crazy eletrical genious. We're contimplating changing my gauge lights over to LED's, does anyone know or can anyone tell me which wire coming into the cluster carries the 12V from the headlight switch to power on the gauge lights? Our thoughts are that since the lights run off of the board (lights obviously screw into it) that we can just run a larger resistor going into the board to eliminate having to solder a small resistor on each and every LED. I'm assuming the Autocheck screen runs off of a different circuit because it comes on and goes off at different times (obviously) than the headlights, so we should be able to get by with this theory. Anyone have a wiring diagram?

UrS4boy

2W bulbs (the upgrade) are $2 each. You need 10. They last 10 plus years. Why consider LED's??

repeater

I was thinking red LED's would take away a bit of the orange look. Maybe Luxian LED's :-)

Emerald-UrS4

Plus you can play with different colors ;-) There was a guy on the German C4 board that changed his whole dash to the blue/purple look same as in the new VW's.

UrS4boy

Like you need more than 10 years. I have an 86 Jetta with the original dash bulbs. LED = $$

Emerald-UrS4

Yes LED's are more expensive, just like S-Cars... you get what you pay for ;^)

repeater

My electrical guy took a Maglite and put 3 of them in it, it's very very bright!

urq20vt

I doubt that you would get very good results, even with the new super bright LEDs due to the inherent directionality of the LEDs. The S4 dash is setup for the incandescent bulbs that are virtually omnidirectional. My guess is that it would end up looking very spotty. It shouldn't be hard to test it by soldering in some LEDs with resistors into old lamp housings.

The other issue that I see is the ability to dim the lights. Getting just the right resistance values might be tricky.

That said, it sure would be nice to not have to worry about replacing bulbs anymore, like on the newer Audis that come with LED dash lighting.

Emerald-UrS4

<ul><li><a href="http://www.lumileds.com/solutions/solution.cfm?id=1#1">http://www.lumileds.com/solutions/solution.cfm?id=1#1</a</li></ul>

Skunns256

hey if you get that to work let me know, its about time for me to replace my dash lights