this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Does anyone know a way to convert an LED car headlight kit to have variable control? (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm thinking of just adding a potentiometer to a car headlight kit, this serves two purposes, 1. Allows me to have bright ass lights in place of my shitty Prius lights on long country roads while letting me turn down the brightness to not blind people in front of me. And 2: I think this would be a fun project to learn a little more about electronics and car mods.

So far I think I would just need the light kit and a potentiometer to use as a control interface, and maybe some sort of transistor with a heatsink, and possibly a diode to prevent reverse voltage damage. I'm not sure about the heatsink but I know that LED lights being so efficient use almost all of their energy on light, I'm just not sure what will happen to that energy if throttled, making me think it may possibly come off as heat in the transistor.

What do you all think? Doable?

Edit: consensus seems to be it's not practically feasible, do what I think I'll end up doing is just upgrading my brights specifically so I can have a dumbed down version of the same thing

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

LEDs have a driving circuit to them, putting a potentiometer in there will just under power the driver and probably do nothing to the LEDs brightness at all. In order to dim LEDs, a driving circuit turns them on and off really fast with a PWM signal, not variable voltage. I'd recommend trying to build a LED driving circuit with an Arduino to get a mechanical understanding of how they work, then never touching your headlights. Proper headlights are lensed so they can be bright but not shine into people's eyes. If your Prius does not have LED lights from factory, but you want brighter lights, just replace your current halogens with higher quality/brighter halogens rather than poorly implemented import LED bulbs that'll rarely work right in halogen reflectors and cause you to be an on road nuisance. You are probably also due for a headlight polishing, which you can buy a kit for, and will significantly improve your headlight brightness.