Tailights

The genesis of this idea, was a YouTube video I watched in the fall of 2019

I was instantly captivated by the idea of making a similar set of taillights, however I did not have the experience or tools necessary to start on this project and so I waited.

After my experience trying to produce a product with mass market appeal, I decided that the better path would be for me to compete in a niche market.

The issue with the LED wall panels was the start up cost, even if I were able to contact a manufacturer and produce a number of the panels to sell on Amazon or some other e-commerce website, I didn't have the funds to patent the design. So any success would be short lived.

This is when I remembered that YouTube video and began plans to construct a similar pair of taillights for my Miata.

In the beginning I planned to just copy the YouTube design.

The YouTuber, Garageless, used a LED controller in combination with a 12 - 5v buck converter to convert the 12v signal from the factory wiring harness into something that the LED strip can understand.

For this project I opted to use 144 led/m strips vs the 60 led/m strips I used for the LED wall panels.

While more expensive this greatly improved the brightness of the Taillights as well as improved the "Infinity Mirror Effect"

The problem with this method, is that it operates by taking all four input signals individually and outputting them to separate LED rings. The issues this creates are two fold, one due to the width of the LED strips (12mm) the lens cover no longer fit over the taillights.

And second the effect it produces is sloppy

Because the two rings only can accept one input each whenever only one is being used there is a gap in the effect, reducing the number of rings shown and thus the brightness.

These issues force me to create my own design which utilized Arduino's to read the inputs and output to only one ring per slot. This allowed the lens to sit properly on the taillights and improved the infinity effect.

Pictured above is an early breadboard design of the circuit followed by a protoboard that I made of the same circuit. This part of the project took place over the summer before I took circuits two at Murray State, so I just copied a basic voltage divider circuit and modified the inputs and outputs to fit my needs.

The circuit uses a combination of Zener diodes, voltage dividers, and a 12-5v buck converter to convert the 12v signals from the factory harness down to something the Arduino can process while also powering the LED's and the microprocessor.

Around this time I also opted to include a third ring for the turn signal to make the design more consistent.

With all of this complete the taillights were finally ready to go on the car as seen below.

The issue is they weren't visible, all my previous testing had been inside or at dusk so I had never considered a lack of brightness to be a pertinent issue.

This was a major set back, and at this point I was beyond YouTube tutorials to solve my problem.

The issue was less about brightness and more about the angle you were viewing the lights from, as you can see above the LED's were visible from the side. This is due to them being mounted so that they face inward, looking at them from an angle equates to looking at them head on.

And so I bought more LED's

These worked but they couldn't sit lose with the tailights and so I had to 3d model and print some holders pictured below so that they were directly touching the one way mirror.

I also bought an 8x8 LED matrix to place in the middle portion of the tailights

This allows me to display images, gifs, and scrolling text on the Taillights

This has never been done before.

The purpose of this is to help peoples cars stand out at car shows, which snowballs into more followers on social media which combined with brand deals can turn into a revenue stream for successful creators

This combination of outward facing LED's and custom code allows for the taillights to be much more visible.

Next I created a PCB and had it shipped to me with SMT assembly from JLCPCB

The initial design had too small of traces and I had to redesign the pcb.

The next version worked much better and I was able to create a much more complete version of the prototype.

I was also able to improve the "centering" of the leds, by altering the laser cut file and designing a 3D printed centering jig.

With the electronics attached properly and the LED's centered all that was left is code development, I was able to successfully transfer text to the taillights and display the message on the car.

Below is a video showing the lights in action

The next step for the project is finishing develop on an app which will allow the user to control the tails from their phone using bluetooth

Then launching a marketing campaign to generate interest in the product using influencers on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok