Meter4it F-150 Sequential / Chase LED lights

Where imagination, appeal, and technology collide placing you in control.

Promoting the use of turn signals one car at a time!

This was performed on a 2001 F-150 SuperCrew truck with a fiberglass tunnel cover .

Jerry now has Sequential / Chase on his F-150 truck. Below I will try and provide all the information that I have to better explain the process and to help you if you would like to duplicate this for your car or truck.

Please note that I do not supply LED's or PCB's for this only the Sequential / Chase unit and the proper wiring of the Sequential / Chase unit. You must know the color of the wires on your car or truck that provide Left and Right turn signal, Ground, and a 12Vdc power.

This started out because my brother wanted to add the Sequential / Chase to his Ford truck. Well, as you know trucks usually only have 1 light bulb per side. We must add more lights! We could modify the original taillight but this would give other problems like one light shining onto the next one canceling out the effect, this is because there is no divider in the taillight housing. Another one would be to build an LED (Light Emitting Diode) array that would go inside of the factory taillight, Jerry said no to this. We finally decided that the tunnel cover would be the best place. Now what type of light to use? We did not want to change the look of the truck as to draw attention until the lights were on. Thought about trailer lights but they are to big and well, ugly for this application. We like LED's because they are bright, they don't draw much current and being clear, all most white they would blend in with the white paint and hopefully not be seen. The one down side is that they are directional ( most LED's only have a 15 degree viewing angle). We thought if we get 5mm diffused LED's basically the whole LED would light up and give us 180 degree of light. Well, Jerry ordered the crystal clear LED by accident....#$*^... We though about it and decided to bead blast one to see what it looked like. This was the fix. Basically now they are diffused and you can see them at any angle. I don't recommend this because it's a lot of work and it's hard to hold the little LED's with gloves.

Now we need to design a guide for the drill so the finished product looks professional. Having access to a vertical milling machine my brother made a template that would guide the drill. The holes were spaced 10mm apart, center of one LED to the center of the next LED. Jerry used 3 rows of 30 for the guide. With this we could use 3 rows, 2 rows or 1 row, depends on space and what looks best. Also could make chevron design <<< >>>. As you can see we used 2 rows of the template for a total of 60 LED's per side.

Now the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to hold the LED's. After bring myself up to speed on LED's and learning some new things on the proto board I was ready to designed the circuit board using Eagle CAD software. NOTE: I wanted the LED's to not only turn on for the Brake and Turn Signal but to work for Parking lights too. I decided to use three PCB's per side. Each one would hold 2 rows of 10. After printing the PCB on to "Press-n-peel" (Purchased from Techniks.com) I ironed them to copper clad boards then etched them and then drilled the holes ( a bunch of holes I should say). OK I'm not going into a lot of detail because the internet has a wealth of information on PCB making.

The PCB's provide Turn signal and Parking lights (running lights) by sharing LED's. The Parking lights are about half as bright as the Turning lights. We chose to use the The Parking lights are optional because the factory taillights are still in use. This is pretty neat, at night you only see the factory taillights and when you apply the brake or turn signal, it's a surprise to the driver behind you and then he notices the Chase pattern. Pretty cool I must say.

As you can see the template has three rows but we chose to use only two rows.

Each PCB has 20 Red LED's. We used three PCB's (60 LED's) per side for a total of 120 LED's both sides. A lot of drilling!

Here are some pictures of the PCB with just the diodes, resistors and PCB with LED's. The picture on the right is with the LED's of one PCB inserted into the holes of the tunnel cover.

This is the LED's after soldering the connections to the PCB's.

Below you can see the PCB's in place and wired up for testing. We used 5 minute epoxy to hold them in place. Recommend 30 minute because 5 minute epoxy hardens TO FAST. This was applied on the backside of the LED's and to the inside fiberglass bed cover. This secured the LED's / PCB and makes a weather tight seal. Later we will hide the wires and PCB's by covering them with the factory carpet.

This is some finished pictures.

This picture shows the courtesy light on the tunnel cover, we used it for our source of power and ground.

Another thing we had to do was to modify the flashers rate of flashes per minute. Although the Chase pattern still worked we agreed that it would look better if it was around the same speed as our brothers 68 Shelby that we had earlier put the Sequence / Chase unit on.

We added the black capacitor to slow things down (Must match polarities of capacitors). Picture shown above provided over a 2 second delay, way to much. Although I don't have a picture of the final capacitor arrangement we ended up with 5uf total for capacitance. This gave us around 1 second delay, life is good! NOTE: We has to recalibrate the Sequential / Chase unit via the Calibrate button, no sweat there.

Below are pictures of the location of the electronic flasher. Basically behind and below the steering column. You must remove the plastic cover and then unplug the Blue flasher. Now think twice before you remove the Blue cover (ask your self "should I be doing this?")

One last thing is were we tapped into the factory wiring harness to get the Left, Right Turn signals and Parking lights. I have no picture so I will tell you. The tunnel cover pivots at the back of the cab so we ran the three wires to the front of the bed along the top of the tunnel cover. Down to a rubber plug continuing to the drivers side frame were the factory wiring harness happens to be. After removing the electrical tape we soldered connections to (Light Green / Orange strip for left), (Orange / light Blue strip for right), and (Brown for Parking lights).

This is a picture of the PCB, you could take this and make a PCB using "Press N Peel".