I've become somewhat expert at identifying cheap prefabulated automotive LED modules on AliExpress that seem unlikely to be problematic, and modifying them to be something other than awful and stupid.
It seems like such needless work. All I want are ~3000k LED widgets in various standard-automotive sizes that aren't stupid.
What I get are ~3000k LED widgets that are overdriven and painful to be around at night, which also have extra "CANBUS" resistors that only serve as heaters.
It's all pretty repulsive. Some recentl examples I got consumed 2.6 Watts, and about half of that was deliberately wasted as nothing but heat.
(2.6 Watts is quite a lot for a little LED board to dissipate, which results in early failures and flickering and other nonsense.)
But with the stupid heater-resistors removed, that dropped to only an eye-burning 1.3 Watts.
With the current-limiting resistor swapped to a higher value, power consumption was reduced to a few hundred mW and the light output approximated the relatively-unintrusive incandescent lamp that was originally fitted.
And finally, after all of that work of finding and modding the things, I can open the car door at night without becoming blind -- just like it was the 1990s again -- and also preserve the battery for things like starting the engine.
It seems like such needless work. All I want are ~3000k LED widgets in various standard-automotive sizes that aren't stupid.
What I get are ~3000k LED widgets that are overdriven and painful to be around at night, which also have extra "CANBUS" resistors that only serve as heaters.
It's all pretty repulsive. Some recentl examples I got consumed 2.6 Watts, and about half of that was deliberately wasted as nothing but heat.
(2.6 Watts is quite a lot for a little LED board to dissipate, which results in early failures and flickering and other nonsense.)
But with the stupid heater-resistors removed, that dropped to only an eye-burning 1.3 Watts.
With the current-limiting resistor swapped to a higher value, power consumption was reduced to a few hundred mW and the light output approximated the relatively-unintrusive incandescent lamp that was originally fitted.
And finally, after all of that work of finding and modding the things, I can open the car door at night without becoming blind -- just like it was the 1990s again -- and also preserve the battery for things like starting the engine.