This weekend I did the LED conversion on my dash and associated side pods. Some of the globes had blown so what better chance to get in there and spruce it up a bit. The job wasn't difficult as such, just time consuming and fiddly because you're dealing with tiny components.. The LEDS I bought from http://www.superbrightleds.com For the dash I bought the WLED (single wedge base bulbs, first ones on the page) and the WLED-x5 (further down the page) found on this page: Dash LEDs I bought both because I didn't know which would work best. For the left and right pod I bought 3mm LEDs from this page: 3mm LEDs I bought both red and blue which I'll explain later. Anyway, I'll start with the right side pod (lights, cruise control etc) as this is by far the easiest out of the pods to do (you'll find out why the left pod is difficult further down). Once you remove the pod and look at the back of it you'll find 5 little screw in lights (indicated by yellow dots) For this pod, Nissan was smart enough to put the globe directly behind the button of interest to light it up quite nicely. This is even more critical for LEDs because they are directional rather than diffuse, and hence the linear light pattern can cause "hot spots", a problem more apparent on the left pod as you will see later. When you remove the lights, this is what they look like. They all have a little blue "condom" on them to give them that pale white color. Without the condom, they light up a dull yellow which looks gay in my opinion. To replace the globe with LEDs you firstly have to unravel the thin wire of the globe and simply pull it out of the housing. Then comes the LED replacement. You cant simply just put in LEDs as they will simply fry in a matter of seconds without a resistor. I tested this by hooking one up and it literally blew up in my hands in a matter of seconds.. So you need to buy the appropriate resistor to wire in line on the positive leg of the LED. The resistors you will need are very much dependant on which ever LED you buy. There are many online calculators that will do this for you. All you need to know is the source voltage (I used 13.5 volts for the car battery), the amps needed and the forward voltage of the LED (provided on the information sheet that comes with the led). Anyway, enough with the boring maths For me, I used 560 ohm (1 led) and 390 ohm (2 leds in series) resistors bought from JayCar electronics For the LED adaptation, you feed the legs of the LED into the bulb holder. The negative leg (the shorter leg) you can just wrap around the holder and normal. But the positive leg (longer leg) needs the resistor soldered onto it, before wrapping the wire around the holder. When soldering, don't heat up the LED too much otherwise it will die. As I mentioned before, LEDS have a very directional light and as such I wanted some sort of cap to help scatter the light a little better. Pauls (method) idea of using plastic bag wrapped around the led was a good idea, but I just couldn't get the small plastic bag cut out to stay attached to the tiny bulb properly. So I needed another idea. For this, I pilfered some needles from the lab where I work as they come with a nice opaque plastic cover for the needle. After a bit of cutting, I had some nice little caps that fitted perfectly.. Once you've made your little LED conversions they can all be put back into the back of the pod. This is the annoying part because LEDs are polarized. Unlike normal bulbs, they only work in one direction and the back of the pod is not marked with a positive or negative to know which way the polarity is. So if you put the LEDs in and they don't work, take them out, put them in the other way and they will light up. To make it easy, I have marked the back of the cluster with big red "+" symbols so you know which side the positive leg of the LED (with resistor) should be on. Now we move onto the annoying pod, the left pod or what is either the A/C climate control or the manual aircon controls. The problem with this pod is the location of the bulb holders in relation to the buttons it has to light up. I can understand why Nissan did it the way they did, mainly due to a lack of room, but the design surely doesn't help when putting LEDs in. As an example, there is only one bulb to light up the REC, ECON and OFF buttons on the A/C Climate control and this same bulb is also to supply light to the digital display of the A/C climate control. To try and achieve this, Nissan put some plastic diffuser in there to try and scatter the light pattern, but this doesn't really work wit LEDs due to the directional light. If you only put in one LED, you end up with some very bright buttons and some very dull buttons, ie "hot spots". So trick with this pod is to put in more than one LED in each bulb location. This is the tricky part, as to achieve this you need some delicate soldering and you have to completely open up the pod. When you open up the pod (just undo every screw you can find and just keep digging) you end up with this: The bulbs you have to replace are indicated by the green, red and blue dots. The bulb at the green dot is meant to light up the auto and windscreen defrost button. The amount of space in this area is small and so Nissan put some plastic diffuser in there to scatter the light and illuminate both buttons. This is harder with the LED. I tried to wire in 2 leds, each one pointing to each button but I just didn't have the space to do this. As such, I put in one LED with a diffuser cap, which helped a little. The bulb at the red dot lights up the up and down arrow of the climate control. At the back of this button, Nissan put is some red plastic for the up arrow (warm) and blue plastic for the down arrow (cold). If you just put in one blue LED, then the red arrow becomes a dull purple which looks silly. To get around this, I wired in 2 leds, one red (for the red arrow) and one blue (for the down arrow). This worked a treat and there is ample space to do this. The bulb at the blue dot, and most difficult to convert to LED, illuminates the REC, ECON and OFF buttons, the HI / LOW buttons and is also there to provide some back lighting to the digital display. Although Nissan put plastic diffuser to provide light to the three buttons and some mirror to light up the digital display, this is just damned hard with one LED. So here I wired in 2 leds, one pointing towards the 3 buttons (REC, ECON, OFF) and one pointing towards the HI/LOW buttons. This nicely lights up all the buttons with even light and no hot spots. I also had one led pointing up towards the digital display, but I found this provided too much blue light and made it hard to see the numbers on the digital display. So I took out the third LED, and the mirror does a good job at reflecting light from the other 2 LEDs onto the digital display. Scattered around the circuit board of this pod you'll see some yellow LEDs which are soldered into the board. These are the lights that come one when you press the buttons. If you were game, you could desolder these and replace them with whatever color you wanted. But I wasn't courageous enough to solder directly onto the board and potentially stuff it up. The final annoyance in the left pod is the light bulb for the window wiper knob. To get to it, you have to remove the bottom part of the cluster where one of the wire looms attaches. Once removed, you see this: (these photos are actually from a manual aircon control unit, but the bulb is in the same location in the A/C climate control unit. I forgot to take photos at this point so had to borrow from elsewhere..) Once you get this stupid little bulb out, you see this: It looks like a penis and is one of the worse bulbs you have to work with. The casing is made of rubber, which falls apart when you start taking out. The consequence of this is that the legs of the LED you put in there, wont contact the terminals properly and hence not light up. To get around this, I ended up having to actually solder the legs to the terminals. The other problem is that this light provides stuff all light!! But thankfully there is another way to light it up. Its hard to describe here, but you can actually connect up another LED, and run it down the back of the cluster which will point directly at the window wiper icon and light it up beautifully. To achieve this, I constructed this little guy: It essentially connects to the illumination circuit of the original globe, but runs on the outside and down towards the window wiper icon. I just used some electrical tape to hold it in place and stop it from shorting out. It looks kind of ghetto, but it works a treat.. Once all done and back together, this is what it should like.. Once again, the red "+" symbols indicated the positive terminals so you don't have to stuff around with the LEDs too much.. The last thing I changed in this pod was the globe for the hazard switch. This unit has to be removed anyway when getting to the dash, so why not change the globe. I had initially left the normal globe but it just looked so dull compared to the LEDs.. To get the globe, you have to unclip the top part of the unit which reveals the sliding mechanism of the switch (which just slots back in) and another one of those stupid penis globes. This globe will suffer the same outcome of the other penis globe, where the rubber may tear and the legs not contact the terminals properly. But you have heaps more room to work with here and once again, I just soldered the legs onto the terminals. Once all together, I pointed the LED towards the back of the Hazard button to light it up quite nicely. Ok, if you've read this far (are you insane?) we finally get to the Dash. Once the Dash is out, you will see the globes you need to change on the back. The yellow dots show the globes you have to change. The other bulbs you see are for things like fuel light, indicators etc etc and I didn't touch these. The standard globes also have blue condoms on them (geee's lots of talk of penis and condoms in this writeup). The first globes I tried were these one. These are single wedge base bulbs, with a concave tip to scatter the light. But I didn't find them bright enough. So I ended up using the WLED-x5 bulbs. These bulbs have tiny little bulbs that point in all directions, and are quite bright. Now, running down the bottom of the dash cluster are these tiny illumination bulbs which are meant to provide some sort of back lighting to the display. But I found they affected the contrast of the blue light, and also reflected this pale green light off my aluminum dash surround which I always found annoying. So I took them out. Thankfully the WLED-x5 bulbs already come with built in resistors and are wedge bulbs, as such there is no stuffing around. Simply pull out the old globes and put in these ones. Also, they are non-polarised so they work in any direction just like normal globes.. Now here we get to another of Nissans stupidity's (probably worse than the penis globes). To effectively light up the dash cluster, Nissan once again used plastic diffuser to distribute the light. You can see some of this in the pic above, where the 2 bits of clear plastic on either side of the LED, collect the light and distribute it around the speedo, tacho and other gauges..BUT!!! the diffuser only travels along the bottom half of the speedo and tacho from about the 10 o'clock to the 2 o'clock position! So unfortunately, in the top bit of the speedo and tacho, there will undoubtedly be some hot spotting which really cant be avoided. Here you can see a lack of the diffuser behind the tacho, even though the fuel guage next to it has enough to look like a Christmas tree when lit up.. same for the speedo, no diffuser behind the top part of the speedo face.. Stupidly, Nissan maybe knew of this deficiency?. or not?.. who knows?.. but they have put a hole for a wedge bulb directly behind the speedo where there is no diffuser.. The hole even runs directly behind the illumination circuit.. but guess what?? There is no damn bulb in that position!!! Why put a hole for a bulb and the have no bulb???? Weird. Once again, for someone courageous, you could attempt to put a globe there and connect it to the illumination circuit on the back of the dash?. But the copper circuits look extremely thin and I wasn't game. Another alternative is to wire in some more LEDs in there, but that's a lot of stuffing around which I wasn?t prepared to do. If someone does do it, please let me know how? Finally ( I promise), I changed the color of the light ring around the ignition barrel. Normally it's an orange color but I wasn't happy with that. So I took out the normal wedge bulb and wired in 2 red leds, to get a nice bright red ring (oh dear). So after all that, this is the end result. Sorry for the pic quality, but the exposure of my camera was a little high and made some of the blue light look whiter than what it really is. But trust me, it's a nice deep blue, even light. Here you can see the red leds lighting up the red up arrow and hazard switch. Once again, the exposure makes it look orange but it is rather a bright red.. Once again, the Ring of Fire, sorry the ignition barrel light ring looks orange but is in fact a bright red. Why didnt Nissan make this light up when the doors open like other cars so you can see where to put the key?? some more pics? The only thing I don?t like about this whole setup is that the location of the diffuser and the bulb make the redline look a purple color rather than red. The pics make it look more purple than it really is, but yeah, it does go a little purple due to the blue light. Oh well. Now I can call it the "purple line"... For this pic, I have purposefully upped the exposure to highlight the feint hot spotting due to the lack of plastic diffuser at the top part of speedo and tacho. Its not that bad in person ( in fact I don?t think you can even see it in the above pics) but its something people should be aware of if doing the LED conversion.. Having said that, even my normal bulbs were more dull in those locations so its really a Nissan design thing.. Damn you Nissan.. Anyway that's it. So why did I go blue?? Well my Smithy door sills light up blue, my sub speaker grill has blue LEDs and my Alpine stereo currently has blue buttons (although this can be changed to whatever color I want). Red was my other option and I think that would look awesome and would be interested to see the results if someone did it. Hope you enjoyed the read..
Godamnit. I was happy with mine until you posted those pictures. Lol. Looks absolutely awesome. I ended up not doing the bottom left LED of the aircon cluster coz it was an absolute PITA. Great work dude. Vote to FAQ!
Hey that looks really damn good! I did my instrument panel with blue LEDs a month or so ago and was really happy with it. But i think u've inspired me to do the pods aswell - they look awsome! Great write up too :zlove:
hey jedi, nice results. i pulled my cluster out today to fix me odometer and was thinking bout changing the light too, and your result just opted for me to do mine , nice job, looks awesome
that is awesome. Looks time consuming but might do it if i go ahead and change the dash to incorporate different guages
Really top grade write up and excellent work Mark, very very nice execution and factory result. Will do this myself soon (ultra white version) and you have taken all the hard work out of it. Thankyou.
Excellent TA Mark. I've added LINKs in A-Z under Conversion & in Electrical Section. Will you continue to host pics?
Thanks Mark, thats just about perfect timing, I'm wanting to convert my instrument panel globes to a red colour! But as i know VERY little about the zx at this stage I didnt even know what globes to buy Once again thanks, yet another thorough walkthrough, very good job!
Top Stuff! I want to go Red. Also the light around the ignition barrel for me is a green colour though, not orange.
Wow, and ZDUCTIV Hope your conversion will look as good as this one , what a difference!, great write up and def vote to FAQ!
Fantastic write-up, and a terrific improvement. Congratulations Mark, for a great effort. I have wanted to do this, as I have changed most of my globes to LEDs(I did the dash 5 LED Blue Wedge globes sometime ago), but I can't get myself motivated to do these tiny ones yet. You have a willing customer here, if you ever decide to do some more of these sidepod conversions, name your price.:zlove::zlove::zlove:
Rob... Hi Rob, I can continue to host pics for now. In the event that Monash Uni cancels my account or something happens to the pics online, I will contact you in which case the pics will have to be hosted elsewhere... Also, I have discovered one mistake in the writeup. In the section where I finish talking about the A/C pod, there is a sentence that reads: "Once all done and back together, this is what it should like.. Once again, the red "+" symbols indicated the positive terminals so you don't have to stuff around with the LEDs too much.." However, there is no pic... I must have forgotten to put one in. The pic that should be there is the pic below: Cheers
Thanks guys Thanks for the kind words.. I hope my pics and writeup make it easier for other people doing the same thing. It takes sometime, but as with everything that you do yourself, if the results are good, then its very worth it. Especially for the zed..:zlove: :zlove: Cheers
One question. Mark! How do the leds work with the dash dimmer control. What you have done looks awesome, BUT (my least favorite word) they seem from the pics to be a bit bright and, maybe, a distraction for night (highway) driving!
