LED conversion for the Climate-control; Writeup

so, i finally got off my ass to install the 16 LED's in my spare 89+ CC unit... (since i was staring at this 2002 WRX stock 6-disc in dash head unit and got all my electrical stuff out to solder the radio harness)

so, for the CC, here is what i ordered to change the Button/icon backlighting (im not changing the Selected-function lights).

14 x RL3-W3030; super white T1's, 30* viewing angle, 3000mcd
1 x RL3-B2030; 470nm Blue T1, 30* viewing angle, 2000mcd
1 x RL3-R4545; 627nm Red T1, 45* viewing angle, 4500mcd

the Up arrow of the Temp button is now Red, the Down arrow of the Temp button is now Blue. i ordered Aqua thinking it may be imply a "cool" impression, but it turned out to be more green than i wanted... so its now blue.

in order to Test the stock LED's on the board as to which leg was Pos and which leg was Neg, i needed a 3.0v-4.5v battery. i had 2 good AA batteries and 1 "bad" AA. the two Good ones tested at 1.5v on my dvm, the "bad" one tested in at 1.0v. i took my soldering iron, tinned the tops and bottoms of the batteries. i took some 14ga wire i have, and tinned the end each time before soldering them to the batteries. i soldered them in series and ran 2 leads off the first and last battery, and then taped it up so i have a 3-cell "pack" w/ bare leads. it measures in at 3.5v now. i used this to test my stock LED's for polarity before unsoldering. i used a Black Sharpie to mark on the Board itself which side was negative.

unsoldering the stock LED's is a Pita. you need like 3 hands to do this. one to hold the Board, one to hold the iron and one to take the tip of a steak knife and carefully pry the legs out as they are unsoldered. i didnt use solder sucker cuz i just didnt buy any. after i removed all the stock LED's, i took the tip of the iron and wiped it on a wet pad pad to remove excess Solder, rosin and such. when i touched the tip of the iron on the open pads on the board, it would wick away some solder. some careful manipulation of the solder allowed the holes to "open" up.

forming the Legs w/ the LED's from superbrightleds.com was fairly easy. the cross-section of the legs are 4-sided, not round. they also have stamped areas about 4mm down from the LED itself. at the bottom of these stamped pads is where i bent the legs at 90* outward. then about the same distance from that 1st bend, i bent them at 90* again. they line right up in the holes and drop in but need some muscle to get them to slide into the groove of the plastic positioning peg's. with all of them in, they look quite stock.

as for soldering, you want to be careful not to leave the iron on the legs too long because getting the LED itself hot will destroy it. of course, the easiest way for me was to hold the tinned tip of the iron about 8mm above the board, on the leg. the heat transfered into the leg and conducted down the leg to the hole in the board. you can "walk" the molten solder down from part of the leg touching the Iron down to the pad on the board. when the part of the leg going thru the hole gets hot enough to bond w/ the molten solder, itll flow into the hole and join the Leg to the Pad. the moment this happens, REMOVE the iron!!!! it doesnt take much longer for this heat to get past the part of the Leg you want to solder and travel TOO far up and get the LED itself hot. fortunately, the bends in the legs affords you some extra "wick" between the Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) and the LED itself.

if you made the LED tester like i did, you can then test the freshly-soldered LED to make sure you didnt overheat it and kill it. doing it like i said, all my LED's are functional and bright as Fcuk! i just have to find out which wires on the CC connector are for Illumination and ground so i can test all of them at once.

as i post this, im in the middle of soldering the remaining LEDs in but im going to test the Ill circuit to make sure its all kosher. i suppose ill put up some pics since im cool like that