Explanation (Prologue): Okay. So I have been doing some modding on my car. I have been trying to get my inside lights to become purple and of course I pick the hardest color to work with because it just doesn't light up like all the other colors do. So, instead of just going to easy route, I want to be unique. I have been working on this for about a month now, what I am doing is I am putting regular leds in there to brighten up everything. The more leds, the more light. Makes sense. So it did work, but I ran into an issue. If you are familiar with taking the AC Unit apart, I modded the clear plastic piece so that I could fit leds on it and I wired them all together. I did the idiot mistake and just didn't put electrical tape on the wires at first.

Problem: So I put thing on, screwed it on, and then 3 lights at the bottom decided to stay on. There is no way to turn them off. Even when I press the button. I dont know if I connected two channels or what.

Questions (Possible Solutions): I was wondering if there was a way to reset it. Like if you were to take the negative off the battery for 3 minutes how that resets the car.

Tried: I have tried to unplug the battery for 3 minutes. I have unplugged the ac unit itself. I have taken out the circuit baord itself.

I just can't seem to figure out how to fix this thing. My only solution will be to cut the leds out and have them not exist anymore but I don't want to do that. I want to have my car be fully functional. Any help?

Some pictures: For those who just can't picture it.





Pictures of Actual Modded Piece: (tape was added afterward)

 

Did you damage the circuit card or any of the leads/traces? It could be that when you placed the clear piece on with the LEDs, they may have shorted or opened a trace, which could lead to this situation. If you are soldering LEDs, I assume you have a DMM? If so, probe which pin on the circuit card runs the illumination power (if there is one) and temporarily pull it and see if that solves your problem. If so, you know its just the illumination circuit.

 

Okay... Where a DMM? I may have one but I'm not hip with the lango. And then you lost me after that. Haha. Let me explain my design. As you can see I'm the picture, I have the twist lock led pulled out and two cords coming from the casing of it. That is my positive and negative for my leds. I can take a picture of the plastic preece if need be. But again, it was exposed wire (stupid rookie mistake) and I assume that it connected two things that weren't supposed to be connected. I didn't actually solder oh this board so there in no issue on two things being connected that shouldn't be. Any ideas?

 

DMM = Digital Multimeter...

Can you take a picture of how it's wired, i've done component level mods on my stock stereo, where i had to actually short on of the bulbs with a resistor cause once burnt out, and a few of the lights are in series so i did this so only one light doesn't work...the HVAC board is a fairly simple circuit...

 

Okay. I have added the pictures of the unit that I actually modded. I added the tape on after the lights decided to never turn off again. I do have a DMM. Can you please explain more where I should be putting it. Also the setting and stuff I should be using. I have only used it once and didnt really know what I was doing.

 

you shorted something...where did you connect the wires to the board?

do they turn off if the ignition is off?

 

Yes. If you see the first pictures, look at the top left. I have wired 2 wires connected (soldered then hot glued so they don't fall apart) to the twist lock led container. they turn off with the ignition and they also dim with my lights dimmer. Is there anyway to unshort this? :/

 

is that a no?
bold for some help.

 

Well, whenever I do some new mod and then the car is worse off afterwards, I always start undoing everything I did to see where it goes back to normal. So in this case I would undo everything you had done - unsolder all wires you added to the circuit card etc and see what happens. Also if you could find another HVAC control circuit card you could swap in and see if the error is isolated to you card, that will also help you to know where to look. Is there a chance that when you were soldering, you either A) dwelt on the solder joint too long and reflowed solder elsewhere on the board causing the short or open or B) dropped some hot solder or a solderball somewhere on the circuit card that is causing a short?

 

impossible. all the soldering was done inside my house. i just connected wires in the car. ill go look but there could be no way that i did either of these becuase it worked great until i screwed the thing in. like it would turn on and light up just fine and then i screwed it in place, and bam, all the lights turned on and stayed on. Im confused about this. i could see them doing it if i left my peice on there but when I took it off they still did it. I could see me bridging a gap with exposed wires but now that they are off and the lights are still forced on, i dont even know where to begin.

 

Okay, so I thought you soldered the wires to the board. If not, then yes, what I outlines as possibilities really are imposibilities. I guess I'm confused now. So if you remove your wired lights, does the circuit (button lights) work correctly? In other words, is this "staying on all the time" behavior only manifested when you plug in your mod? If so, then I don't know what you say. I'm curious why you didn't just replace the 2 bulbs used to light your HVAC knobs with some plug and play LEDs - like what they sell here: www.lightrikz.com.
Otherwise, if this "staying on" behavior is now on all the time, even when you remove your mod, then I'm at a complete loss. It could be possible that something else just happened to fail at the same time and there really isn't any connection. A long shot, but possible. Sorry I couldn't be more help. Good luck and be sure to come back and post if/when you finally figure it out so you can help out the next guy who has this same problem!

 

Okay let me explain this.
I want to use purple lights. But the lights themselves are not bright enough to light everything up. In my speedometer and also in my HVAC unit. So to be able to use the color I want and have full functionality I have added extra purple LEDs inside the speedometer and also my HVAC unit. My speedometer is perfect. So I went ahead with my HVAC unit. So I took all of that apart. Took out the clear plastic peice that brings the light to everything. I have hot glued LEDs, resistors, and wires to the plastic piece. Soldered them all together. Then I made this guy;

As you can see it is the twist lock LED bottom that I have modded. I soldered one wire to the negative feed and one wire to the positive feed. Then i filled it with hot glue so that the wires will not easily come off.
You can see in this picture (coppied from above) that in the top left where there is the angled piece that I have two wires coming from the LED circuit I made. This connects to the two wires coming from the twist lock LED bottom.


I did that so that I did not have to solder anything onto the board and risk that. Id rather replace the 2 or 3 dollar bottom rather than replace the board. By the way, where would I buy another board if I needed to? Around how much would they be?

So I have no idea what happened. When I tried to put everything back together (this was without the electirical tape on the plastic piece; aka, there were exposed wires and resistors) the lights just decided to come on and never turn off. Even when I remove all my mods (as you can see in the pictures in my first post).

Thank you for the help.

 

Update: My thoughts on this is that I screwed up this curcuit board. So I went out and bought a new one for 250 at my local junk yard. Thanks for the help people.