this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Engineering

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Does anyone know a way to convert an LED car headlight kit to have variable control? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/engineering
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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 10 months ago (1 children)

While you are correct. It’s not practically correct.

LEDs can be dimmer by modulating them on and off.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Fair point, not sure a potentiometer is going to be able to accomplish that though