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I had this idea about converting the interior lights of my car to LED for quite a long time.
I never did anything about it until the moment when I saw this on sale in Costco for $16.99:
The rope is made of 210 high-brightness soft-white LEDs enclosed in a plastic tube:
Just for your enjoyment, here it is, plugged in and glowing cheerfully for first and last time:
Next, I did something to it that may have voided the warranty - I cut off a piece with 30 LEDs:
BTW, if you know where to cut, you can leave the rest of the rope still functioning.
The tube contains two thick 110V wires between which the LEDs are connected in segments, each consisting of 30 LEDs in series.
If you cut between exactly between two of those segments, the remainder of the rope will still be usable.
Just make sure to insulate the cut end and read the disclaimer on the first page once again.
Anyway, next comes the difficult process of extracting the LEDs.
It's difficult because the LEDs are packaged in two layers of plastic tubing.
Carefully and gently cutting the outer tube followed by application of a lot of brute force helps separate the two:
The inner tube already has a slice on its side.
Prying it open allows the string of LEDs to be pulled out one by one:
The new 12V light is also going to be in a rope.
This means very limited space, so I had to embed the LM3914 in the rope too.
To save space I soldered the resistor directly under the chip:
Not trusting the enamel insulation after all this bending, I then insulated some parts with pieces of paper tape:
The drawing that you see in the background images represents the final dimensions of the new light and helps me cut the wires to size.
The LEDs are all wired with 24 AWG enameled magnet wire:
This disorganized mess has to fit into this brand new plastic tube:
I cut a lengthwise end-to-end slice in the new tubing and squeezed the LEDs and the chip:
The light is almost ready.
After this I only cut the loose wires, attached a flexible cable with connection terminals, and glued them to the end of the tube, making sure they won't break.
The final picture is of the light installed in the car:
The brightness of the new light is very good - much better than the old one, made from incandescent bulbs.
The light is enough for comfortable reading, while at the same time it consumes far less energy than the old one.
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