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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[–] prettybunnys 3 points 10 months ago

If you’re in the USA I believe that there is no street legal LED light conversion kit, unless you buy the OE parts and swap them out.

Which is to say you’re gonna be driving around with ultra bright “I’m an asshole” lights if you do this.

Don’t do this.