This project started as the desire to make some LEDs blue. Let’s face it, who doesn’t like blue light in their cars? Most people I know set their ambient lighting to blue and never look back. Anyway…In their infinite wisdom, Mercedes decided to make the ambient lighting for W221/W216 cars very boring colors. You got yellow. That’s it. In newer versions (facelift) cars you got 2 more color options, equally washed out and boring.
It was time to make it more interesting and make it look like this:
The question was how exactly? And how could we go a step further and make it better than what Mercedes had at the time?
Additional questions were related to the existing footwell lights. What would happen to those and could we incorporate those into the system at all? Could we do automatic brightness and maybe more than one color per area. A blending effect would be really cool.
Our greatest fear was ending up with a Christmas tree effect, like you see in most aftermarket/led strip based systems. Thankfully our car already had ambient lighting so the indirect lighting issue was already sorted for us, provided we could figure out how to mount better/brighter LEDs on the existing light pipes.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though and star picking our components…and break out the breadboard.
Next time we’ll take a look at the basic components needed to make the project work.
