Instead of buying certain light kits and stuff like that....I have alot of leds laying around. I was wondering if I could just make my own light bar kind of thing. Can I do this with 3.3v leds and wire it to the car?

Also, I would like to replace the light on the outside of the driver/passenger side door on my 97 Civic HX 2dr Coupe. Would a 3.3V led work?

How many volts does the battery put out in order to power the lights inside of the car.....like the leds in the dashboard/guages? Is it something like 12V or 5V?

 

It's 12v. Yes you could, it would be a lot of work (especially to make the LED bar) but to wire the 3v LED's you would need to wire a resistor on the positive side of the LED.

 

So you would need a 430ohm resistor at 1/4 watts. (you can get these from radioshack) and that would need to be wired between the battery and the positive side of the LED. You would need to probably solder it and then put heat shrink tubing. But assuming by your question, you don't know how to solder, I would just get some prewired LED's. It would be way to much work to wire several LED's with resistors. On places like eBay you can get like 40 3mm or 5mm LED's of whatever color for like $20-$30. I bought some from the seller plasmaled. I know he has a bunch.

http://search.ebay.com/ebaymotors/_W0QQsassZplasmaledQQhtZ-1

 

Well, I do know how to solder........I used to do alot of led mods back when I did some xbox modding and stuff like that. I wouldn't have to put resisters on each led. I would just wire how ever many leds I want together and calculate what resister I would need to power all of them. I use this rersister calculater.

http://metku.net/index.html?sect=vie...calc/index_eng

I will look at my car later today and see what kind of work I'm really looking at......
That way I can get a better perspective of what I can do myself and what I can't do myself.

Thanks for the info.

 

Would there be a point were I would have too many leds wired to the battery? To the point were it would start to drain power from the battery?

 

No. LED's draw milliamps of power. But you should run them in parallel not in a series since they have voltage drops. But they draw barely any power that you can leave them on when the car is off and they will barely drain your battery at all. And when the car is on it doesn't make a difference at all. That's why they use them for stuff like car alarm notifiers, like the little light that blinks while your car is off. Again though, I think it would be too much work to solder all the LEDs and buy the resistors and everything. Onzium.com sells invididual LEDs too and you can choose how many you want. Also I'd be willing to maybe sell you a few of my 5mm LEDs. Just let me know.