The cheapest daytime running lights are a global conversion. Refinement of running lights How to correct DRL defects

For several years now, daytime running lights have become mandatory for installation on cars in the Russian Federation. The market is overflowing with Chinese crafts that do not meet technical requirements and GOST standards. Car enthusiasts were not at a loss and began to actively make DRLs with their own hands.

To make the right LED DRLs, you need to know what requirements apply to them:

• Luminous intensity – from 400 to 800 candelas;
• luminous angle vertically 25 degrees and 55 horizontally;
• The area that emits light must be at least 40 cm2.

LED strip running lights

To implement such technical requirements in practice, we will assemble DRLs from LEDs with our own hands, using a 5050 type tape with a density of 60 pieces/meter. To get this brightness, you need to cut about 24 LEDs, that's 8 sections.

You can glue the tape around the perimeter of the headlight onto the existing adhesive coating. A more reliable option is to use a cable channel and secure it with epoxy glue, this will be more reliable. As a result, you will get a structure like this:

Do-it-yourself flexible DRLs are made using the same principle.

To ensure that the tape lasts as long as possible, stabilize the voltage at 12 volts. When the engine is running, the voltage in the on-board network can reach values ​​of more than 14 volts. The easiest way is to use a linear stabilizer ROLL or L7812.

Separate 5050 or 5730 LEDs for DRLs

To make homemade running lights from custom-shaped LEDs or use fog light housings for this purpose, the tape may be inconvenient, so you need to make a printed circuit board.

You can use a ready-made breadboard, but this may not be so convenient solution, although more simple. The development board is not as reliable.

To make a drawing of a printed circuit board, use a program like spring layout, then you need to transfer it to the textolite. To do this, you need to print a MIRROR image of the printed circuit board on thin glossy paper. This is used in magazines for pages, the cover is too thick.

You need to print on laser printer, then take an iron and iron the glossy paper on the foil PCB. When it cools down, we soak the paper under running water; a pattern of future paths will remain on the textolite.

Now all that’s left to do is to etch the board into ferric chloride or any other suitable reagent. Detailed information You can find information about laser-iron technology for manufacturing printed circuit boards.

After making the printed circuit board, you need to make the base for the DRL. To do this, we place the LEDs on printed circuit board in accordance with its wiring. To limit the current flowing through the LEDs you need to add 1 50 ohm resistor. Next, assemble a 12-volt stabilizer using the L7812 chip or its analogues.

To provide the required brightness, you need about 24 LEDs, which need to be assembled into a single structure and placed in the housing. We printed narrow boards with 9 LEDs each.

If you take an acrylic tube and place the resulting boards in it, then you will get the following LED DRLs (see below). They can be shaped by heating. construction hairdryer and bending it around the bumper.

If you want to make wide DRLs, you need to connect the boards on top of each other, or separate and etch the board like this.

By the way, more powerful 5730 LEDs are used here. You can use old fog lights as a housing or use furniture profile for illumination with a plastic cover.

Use of high-power LEDs 1-3 W

When making navigation lights with your own hands, in addition to LED strip You can use high-power LEDs.

Previous solutions have one significant drawback - the inability to adjust the direction and angle luminous flux. For high-power LEDs of 1-3W, there are many optical solutions on the market from 10 to 120 degrees.

To make LED DRLs with your own hands on powerful crystals you will need:

• LEDs 1W from 3 to 5 pcs (to provide the required light intensity);
• lenses collecting at an angle of 30 degrees;
• driver for LEDs with characteristics: input voltage 12V, output current 300mA, up to 5W;
• substrate for attaching to the radiator;
• radiator with an area of ​​about 100 cm2.

The driver is needed to provide stabilized current to the LEDs. You can also use a circuit with a quenching resistor as in previous homemade products, but the power of the resistor in this case will be too large and such a solution is not reliable.

To mount LEDs on a radiator, you need either heat-conducting glue or a special substrate for mounting and thermal paste. The LED is soldered to this substrate, and it is screwed onto the radiator.

You can also find ready-made sites for installation, in some cases this is more convenient option. Some stores have such substrates with LEDs mounted on them.

Thermal paste or thermal pad is needed to ensure better heat transfer, as well as fill the unevenness of the substrate and radiator to improve heat transfer.

When making DRLs with your own hands from LEDs using such a kit, you will need a housing; you can make it yourself from scrap materials, or use old fog lights or something similar.

The main mistakes when making DRLs with your own hands

First of all, you need to figure out what kind of device it is. Daytime running lights are not dimensions! They need to be tested not at night, but during the day.

The lights must be visible from a great distance. Contrary to popular belief, when assembling DRLs from an LED strip with your own hands, you need to use the most powerful strip available. With such dimensions as the average running lights, it is quite difficult to exceed the permissible brightness using an LED strip.

Don't forget about cooling, but don't install too large radiators. Do not forget that the flow of incoming air when the car is moving practically replaces active cooling. Therefore, the radiator area can be half as large as under normal conditions for passive cooling of luminaires.

How to properly connect DRL to a car?

In addition to installing and assembling the structure itself, you need to correctly connect everything to electrical diagram car. The picture shows the simplest and reliable circuit DRL connections. Let's take a closer look at it.

K1 is a relay with five contacts, one of the power contacts is normally closed, that is, it is closed when no current flows through the relay winding, and the other is normally open, it closes when current flows through the relay winding. This is one of standard relays and is sold at any auto store.

When you turn on the ignition, power is supplied to the DRL through the normally closed contacts, and when you turn on the low beam, the DRL relay is turned on from the power positive that goes to the lamps and the contacts open.

Making high-quality LED running lights for cars with your own hands is quite simple. They will surpass cheap Chinese crafts in quality and performance, and will work much longer.

Homemade DRLs will be cheaper than branded ones, and the experience gained is priceless.

Hi all! I bought these cheap daytime running lights for the housing, intending to replace their filling with my own. As a result, only the transparent protective “glass” remained intact. Dedicated to lovers of alterations and improvements...

Such DRLs have already been reviewed on MySku (https://site/blog/aliexpress/12041.html,), and frankly, I think that installing such flashlights makes no sense, since they have simply scanty brightness, and, in principle, do not can increase the “visibility” of a car on the road during daylight hours. Well, at night only a crazy person would turn them on instead of the low beams. Therefore, these kids were converted by me into such “monsters” in terms of brightness.

Those who want to see the result of the revision can skip a good half of the text, but I will start from the very beginning.

A long time ago, in mid-June, I received an email from DealExtrema containing a burning (I don’t quite understand the meaning of this word, but it’s appropriate) offer to buy with huge discounts LED bulbs and so on. Okay, I think I’ll see what they offer there... I didn’t think I was going to buy anything. But still, I was sold on 10-watt LED modules on an aluminum substrate, and bought two warm lights and two cold lights. For what purpose, at that time I didn’t know exactly, but I figured it was for home lighting. 4 modules cost $17, which, as I found out later, was not cheap at all. I admit, the order was a little hasty. Here is a link to the cold light module, the discount is now much greater, and the price is now $3.46 per piece:

Well, okay, I ordered it, I ordered it, and began to wait. The parcel arrived in 40 days: a standard bag, and in the bag there are 4 modules, each stuffed into a “pocket” made of bubble wrap. Well, it’s not surprising that the post office abused such packaging: two of four modules They were pretty much bent. First of all, of course, Dylextrim is to blame for saving on packaging; they could have at least stuffed pieces of cardboard to give it rigidity. This is what it looked like:

I took these photos back then for a dispute with the seller, but it turned out that I ignored the transaction protection time in PayPal. I buy from Aliexpress more often, and their protection system suits me, so far it hasn’t let me down (pah-pah-pah): I just keep track of the remaining “protected” time, and Aliexpress itself reminds me that time is running out. Dilextreme works through Paypal, and accordingly the protected time starts from the moment of payment, not sending, which I didn’t think about. In general, summer is not the best best time for disputes with online stores: dacha, village, river, construction site, work, etc. distract from tracking online orders. A day here, a day there... and while I was preparing “evidence” about the damage to the goods, the time for protecting the transaction in Paypal was over. As a result, I now more carefully monitor orders made through PayPal, and open a dispute a few days before the end of the “protection”.

Well, okay, the firewood itself... Let's start testing. I straightened the aluminum base of the damaged modules as best I could. But naturally, such a powerful mechanical impact did not pass without a trace: the LED that got into the bend does not light up, and if you “play” a little with the bend of the aluminum base, it lights up periodically. Another LED on the other side of the module is also blinking - maybe the module was bent in this place and then straightened by the Chinese? For a less bent module, all the LEDs are lit and do not blink. By " happy occasion“One strip of cold light and one strip of warm light were bent, so, unfortunately, I didn’t get a full pair of undamaged modules.

The brightness of the purchased LED modules turned out to be very high, which gave me the idea to use them as daytime running lights. There are no DRLs on my car, and the front of the car is designed in such a way that few DRLs can be installed in it without giving the car a collective farm look. The 10-watt LED modules I bought fit perfectly into the overall appearance of the car, and just fit into the only places possible according to GOST for installing DRLs.

I must say that several of my friends have already spent a nth amount of money on DRLs priced from 500 to 4000 rubles, both online and offline, and, despite laudatory comments on store websites, no one has yet been completely satisfied with the result. For some, the DRLs died in a matter of days, for others they began to blink, for others they still work, but the brightness is many times weaker than necessary, etc. One guy used cheap DRLs he bought as a trunk light, just like the reviewer mentioned above.

I myself was also looking for DRLs, but in the end I gave it up. I didn’t want to buy branded “lights” for 3-4 thousand rubles, because high price, judging by the experience of friends, does not at all guarantee quality and reliability. Poor soldering and assembly, savings on materials (aluminum housing is good, but for powerful LEDs the cooling surface area is still not enough), savings on the thermal interface - even expensive DRLs are dying from this. But the guarantee is of no use; it has long been noted that it is much easier to demand money from a Chinese for a bad product than from a store next door.

Even what the Chinese offer for over $50 does not inspire confidence. First of all, a good LED flashlight must have a good radiator, and the Chinese have so far succeeded only in simulating radiator fins with the profile of a plastic body, imitating brands. Well, it’s clear why Chinese DRLs, even with the truthfully declared power, overheat and die. For example, this “flashlight” came to one friend with an aluminum body, another with a plastic one (photo for example, the seller was different):

Therefore, I decided to take a different path, abandoning the plastic DRL housing as the main design element. For me, the basis of the DRL should be a radiator with a decent surface area; the DRL is also attached to the car using the radiator, as the most heavy element. An LED module is installed on the radiator, and the transparent “glass” only serves to protect the LED module from the external environment. The idea, of course, is not new, and expensive DRLs are made just like that. Although the LED module I bought is considered waterproof, since the LEDs are filled with a compound, it is unlikely that the elastic compound will withstand close contact with rain, snow, ice and dirt, plus washing off this very dirt.

So I started looking for a suitable housing, or rather, not even a housing, but a protective glass for my homemade DRLs. And in the end, the choice fell on the hero of the review, as the cheapest one of the right size on Aliexpress. I was interested in the case itself, but neither the number of LEDs nor their brightness bothered me, so I was looking for the most low price for “boxes with glass.” Boards with LEDs from these “boxes” can then be used somewhere, for example, for the same trunk lighting.

And so, some 1.5 months after ordering, these DRLs arrived to me. The DRL box was very wrinkled, but all its contents were safe and sound. Here is a photo of the DRL, the “glass” is even covered protective film. After receiving them, I checked them - they work, and the light from 12V is somehow too bright, I suspect that the current through the LEDs is too high. But for now the fate of these 16 LEDs does not concern me.

But here is the filling of the DRL: a board with LEDs and a reflector - I will put it aside for the time being, and in the future I will use it somewhere. The quality of soldering on the boards is so-so.

The search for a suitable heat sink among its considerable reserves of “aluminum casting and rolled products” led to the only suitable radiator in length (L>=150mm) from the power supply of an ancient computer. This is the last, third such radiator from my collection - two were already in different time cut into pieces and placed into various electronic devices.

Two “strips” about 20mm wide were sawn off from this radiator, which is about 3-4mm wider than the DRL glass. Special precision was not needed, and therefore one radiator turned out to be about 1mm wider than the second.

Then the process began machining radiator using a hacksaw, belt grinder, files, grinding wheels and bars, drills, taps. The difficulty was that the surface of the radiator where I was going to install the LED module was not initially flat, but contained short “ribs”: they had to be cut off and the surface sanded. But with the right tool, all problems can be solved. Here is a photo of radiators at one of the manufacturing stages.

Actually, this was the first time I used tape grinding machine for processing something harder than wood, and I liked it, without a machine I would have spent a lot more time, but I still wouldn’t have gotten a high-quality plane. The outer three ribs of the radiators had to be cut off, as they would interfere with installation in the car. Here's what we ended up with:

I didn’t bring the plane “to zero” and didn’t polish it to the mirror: the resulting surface cleanliness is more than enough to cool the LED module.

Maybe someone will say that it would be easier to buy a radiator of a suitable size, cut it in half and enjoy life. I actually worked out this version. But nothing suitable was found in radio stores. It was possible to order a piece of an aluminum radiator profile of the required length in some Chip-Deep, but the ribs would then go along the long side of the DRL, which in in this case, it seems to me, is not optimal for cooling. I preferred the ribs to be across the DRL. The Chinese also offer radiators (on the same Aliexpress) in large assortment, but with the length I needed from 150mm, the radiator was already costing $25 + wait another month. Well, the thickness of the radiator base is 3mm - somehow childish. Naturally, I chose to save money, but saving required additional effort, the result of which is shown in the photo above.

The next stage is the installation of LED modules on radiators, using KPT-8 thermal paste (not finished yet).

My main 25W soldering iron for medium-sized elements could not cope with soldering the wires to the module, which indicates good heat dissipation from the module to the radiator. A 40W soldering iron did a 5+ job with soldering wires to the modules.

Then I connected the module to a power source and checked the thermal conditions of the DRL at a rated current of 720mA. I was wondering if the thermal conditions would be out of bounds. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what the voltage was directly on the module, but I vaguely remember that it was about 12.1V, which corresponds to a power of 8.7W. At the same time, the module “shone like a beast” (in the photos the current is reduced so as not to blind the camera).

After half an hour, the radiator temperature turned out to be 57 degrees: already in the first 10 minutes the radiator warmed up to 55 degrees, and over the next 20 minutes it increased by only two degrees. I didn’t test it any longer because I was sure that there would be no further increase in temperature. The measurements were made with a Chinese digital multimeter with an external thermocouple (coated with thermal paste and pressed to the measurement site). To control, I checked my temperature, and the device showed 38 degrees, which is more or less true, but I fully allow for an error in measuring the radiator temperature, plus or minus a couple of degrees. Well, the thermal test was successful; 57 degrees is not enough to worry about the health of the LEDs.

Next, the DRL body was modified so that its “glass” could be placed on the radiator. I had two options for modification: put a piece of glass on the radiator along with black plastic base body by cutting off the back of the black base. Cut:

Or use one piece of glass, attach it directly to the radiator, cutting off the flange that previously went inside the black base. Glass untouched:

It would be nice to make a groove in the radiator so that the bead of glass would fit into it, but without a CNC machine this is a little difficult. I started with the first option, intending to move on to the second if I didn’t like the result.

After sawing off the rear black part of the DRL housing, I tried the rest of the housing with glass on the radiator with the module, turned on the power, and made sure that the glass works as a diffuser.

But I didn't like this design. There was too much emptiness underneath protective glass, besides, I would have to seal two joints: the joint between the glass and the plastic, and the joint between the plastic and the radiator.

Therefore, I moved on to option 2: I removed the black part of the case completely, cut off the collar from the glass, shortened the fastening “posts” into which the screws were previously screwed, and cut an M2.5 thread in the holes of these posts in order to attach the glass with M2.5 screws to the radiator. It was possible, of course, to use self-tapping screws, but I was afraid that the fragile transparent plastic It will crack, especially since there was a high probability that I would have to install and remove the glass several times, and the screws held securely only the first time.

In general the most weakness my design is the output wires. Not only did the radiators already have enough unnecessary holes that had to be sealed, but the wires also didn’t come out in very good condition. convenient places, and they were inconvenient to seal. But I made it with what I had, so I had to get out. I first wanted to route the wires into the holes at the end of the LED module, but the wires ended up next to the radiator mounting to the car, which was also inconvenient, so I routed the wires between the ribs.

And this is what happened in the end:

And how they shine:

The installed glass slightly expands the light flux, distributing it slightly down, up and to the sides, creating the effect that a larger area is illuminated than the surface area of ​​the LED module. Which, in general, was what was needed.

As the current decreases, dead “pixels” become noticeable (first a fully working module, then a “chapped one”):

By good radiator It is worth protecting the LPK, otherwise the silumin on the machine will begin to actively oxidize. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll paint it or just varnish it. For mounting, you can use the supplied brackets, although they are very flimsy. I haven’t installed it on the car yet, because I was a little sick, it was cold outside, and the installation is unlikely to take 5 minutes. Maybe I won’t rush to install DRLs until spring, since in winter I have to drive with headlights both in the morning and in the evening, and DRLs are simply not needed. In addition, I don’t have drivers with a stable output current yet, I’m looking for them, but I don’t want to install resistors at all. In addition, I have not yet decided what it will be final scheme connecting the DRL to the car so that the operation of the DRL complies with GOST. In general, I don’t like to do anything hastily.

This homemade project took more than a month, since I have very little free time at home, and I did everything gradually, little by little: today I brought a radiator, tomorrow I sawed it, the day after tomorrow I sawed off one radiator, the day after tomorrow a second one, after... the day after tomorrow I sanded one, etc. . That's why I held out until the cold weather.

I have not coated the “glass” with sealant yet, but it is clear that this must be done before installing it in the car. It was necessary to cover the radiator with varnish or paint even before installing the modules and sealing the wires, but then I omitted this point. At least I’ll paint it with the “glass pieces” removed, which is why I don’t seal them.

So perhaps my homemade product will sit until spring, and when I have a complete installation kit (DRL + drivers + well-thought-out circuit), I will install it.

Well, that seems to be it. In my opinion, normal (external) DRLs should have exactly this design: a radiator - aka a housing, LEDs on the radiator, and protection of the LEDs from the external environment (glass). Everything else is from the evil one. The brightness of these converted DRLs is certainly not lower than that required by GOST, and I will try to comply with the remaining GOST requirements during installation.

We kindly ask you not to start discussions on the topic of illegality self-installation DRL. It’s clear that if you turn on such flashlights at night, then you’ll have to pay the first price for this. These are “daytime running lights”, they will be used during daylight hours, and will be connected in accordance with the standards. Finally, the coolest option for collective farming, which is offered by one of the sellers on Aliexpress:

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