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Rear  lights     

With the 2 options for tail lights housing need to be different with regular bulbs there needs to be divider at least for reverse and marker lights and a separate division for night/brake lights with recesses for light bulb mounts plus enough clearance for wire harness. Since decision was made to use LED version, the housing has simple back with a small recess for wire grummet or a connector. Inside, flange is required for mounting LED panel and a lens on top. A decision needed to be made with respect to the LED pcb as its quite large being 485x188mm. A thought was to have it divided 3 pieces , problem with that was that it needed to be mounted on compound plane so most probable they would never bend at same rate and would never align so decision was made to make a single board. It will be much easier to fasten and there would not be any interconnection problems between the 3 boards. The other
decision that was made was to make a single reversible board so it could be used for either left or right side. Problem with it is that it is a 8x24 RGB matrix making a total of 192 LED

Now that we are going with LED panel and to control it we need some sort of processor. Original though was to put it inside the housing be directly connected to the LED panel and just have necessary left or right turn signals routed to it. However if configured over CAN bus it would need to differntiate which side it would be on. Than can be easily resolved with dedicated left or right port. However to make it more universal it was decided to have it located external to the light housing as a pluggable module between body harness and have sub harness going to the light housings. Having it external we can make it universal controlling both left and light lights. With the Honda/Acura light stalk it being CAN enabled we can have the module listen to body CAN thus reducing number wires going to it. However to make it really universal the controller also has all of the rear light signal inputs. On top of that if we are listening to just CAN bus the controller decodes and outputs to individual bulb filament.

















With that said first version of controller hardware was made. It features 2 connectors. First connector is to interconnect to the chassis main harness that has various input signals along with power not only for the controller but for driving the LEDS. Second connector is for light sub harness, it has the control signal to drive the LEDS regulated 5 volts from the controller onboard regulator along with 12V battery power if ever used.
As mentioned the controller has regulator for the cCPU and 2 independant 5v regulators for either side of the lights. Has 33.3kb single wire CAN bus along with high speed differential CAN bus but only one of the drivers can be populated. 6 opto-isolated inputs for light functions all driven by STM32103 processor. Other jumpers are available on board for configuration and animation of the board




The controller will listen to either direct wired connection per function and also monitor body CAB bus.

Working on 2 version of tail lights, simple bulb type with out any electronics or a version that does add electronics and can utilize headlight control electronics with couple name changes and some changes to the firmware code to reflect location of the board. See headlight for specifics on the controller.

Other option is to utilize LED matrix, which could have animations and configurable patterns. Heard of the electronics would be based on  headlight control board with extra drive electronics to drive the matrix of LEDs.

Both options are still being investigated.
   Stay tuned to see what the outcome be like