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iPal · 09-25-2003, 02:24 AM

so u can not find any regular light bulb which controlled by dimmer in your whole interior?
i don't quite understand how your interior lights work...
what u mean by illum wire and backlight powered?
hope u finding way to do yours...
here is my video of my new interior...

http://www.imagestation.com/video/vi...210992480&dl=1

u have to click right then save it as different name to download... then play it~

Quote: Originally Posted by gork

iPal:

I ripped open my dash again tonight to take another look at this... I took apart the dash module where the dimmer is located. No luck. It's all electronic. On further inspection, this makes a lot of sense as the interior illumination is a mix of LED, EL backlighting, and Incandescent bulbs. It seems the illumination brightness is varied from 1-12V via PWM on the illumination wire, though I cannot 100% confirm that it is PWM since my multimeter reads true RMS and my oscilloscope is currently out of commission.

The problem I have with powering the inverter off of the Illumination wire is mainly that when the headlights are off, the wire is at 0V .. that would mean no backlight! also, at 1V the inverter would probably not even be able to power the CCFL.. I think what I really need is a circuit that somehow does this:

Illum wire at 0V -> Backlight powered at 12V
Illum wire at 1V (minimum dash brightness) -> Backlight powered at 5-6V or whatever the minimum voltage the CCFL lights at..
Illum wire at 12V -> Backlight powered at 12V

Unfortunately, I know only enough to be dangerous with circuits. I know there has got to be some simple solution to this problem, but I have no idea what it is :-/ This could help a lot of people too to have a workable way to dim the LCD backlight with the rest of the dash...

Again thanks for the help.. I wish my car had an easy solution like yours..

09-25-2003, 02:24 AM	#13
iPal Constant Bitrate Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: LA, CA Posts: 140	so u can not find any regular light bulb which controlled by dimmer in your whole interior? i don't quite understand how your interior lights work... what u mean by illum wire and backlight powered? hope u finding way to do yours... here is my video of my new interior... http://www.imagestation.com/video/vi...210992480&dl=1 u have to click right then save it as different name to download... then play it~ Quote: Originally Posted by gork iPal: I ripped open my dash again tonight to take another look at this... I took apart the dash module where the dimmer is located. No luck. It's all electronic. On further inspection, this makes a lot of sense as the interior illumination is a mix of LED, EL backlighting, and Incandescent bulbs. It seems the illumination brightness is varied from 1-12V via PWM on the illumination wire, though I cannot 100% confirm that it is PWM since my multimeter reads true RMS and my oscilloscope is currently out of commission. The problem I have with powering the inverter off of the Illumination wire is mainly that when the headlights are off, the wire is at 0V .. that would mean no backlight! also, at 1V the inverter would probably not even be able to power the CCFL.. I think what I really need is a circuit that somehow does this: Illum wire at 0V -> Backlight powered at 12V Illum wire at 1V (minimum dash brightness) -> Backlight powered at 5-6V or whatever the minimum voltage the CCFL lights at.. Illum wire at 12V -> Backlight powered at 12V Unfortunately, I know only enough to be dangerous with circuits. I know there has got to be some simple solution to this problem, but I have no idea what it is :-/ This could help a lot of people too to have a workable way to dim the LCD backlight with the rest of the dash... Again thanks for the help.. I wish my car had an easy solution like yours..