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I will admit it, I'm mesmerized by flashy things. LED displays, club lights, lasers, etc. I've always thought the undercar neon kits were indeed cool. Hit me if you will, call me names... but yes, I dig them. I've been looking at them for years. Recently some LED based kits hit the market, and it got me thinking... I started talking to flowlighting, and they sold me a damaged kit at a very steep discount. One of the cables had landed on the exaust, shorted out the computer control module and fried the system. So with the "dead" kit in hand, I repaired the module with some work and got to see the kit up and running. The Blaze kit is indeed very neat. It has 7 colors, and can do some patterns including move to music. It has both a microphone and line input. It has a remote display module, and a remote. It is indeed a cool setup, and I give it a huge thumbs up. But I'm not satisfied like that, and set out from the beginning to do more. There is a kit that I found out about called IceLED. It is more in-line with what I want, but is very expensive. I'm not sure how my setup will compare -- we will have to wait and see. The IceLED has the ability to address LEDs individually on the bars, and seems to do pulse width modulation.... Pretty cool stuff. I'm going to call mine IcedBlaze, a bit of a salute to both. The steps are as follows... Take apart the tubes, add two 74HC595 serial decoder ICs, then add two sourcing driver IC's that have 8 drivers per chip. The blaze kit has 4 tubes that each use a 8 pin connector similiar to a computer networking cable. 3 pins control power to red, blue and green. 5 pins are ground to individual segments. So it can do patterns by toggling the 5 grounds, and change colors by togglign the 3 power pins. The thing is, it can only do a solid color at a given time. With my IcedBlaze, the chips allow 16 discreet outputs. So I joined the ground of the 5 segments, and cut the traces going to red, blue and green LEDs into 5 discreet sections. Now there are 15 segments for power, and one ground. The 75HC595 chips feed the source drivers which switch the power to the segments. It would be much cleaner if the boards were made differently, but they did what was right for their design.... and I've made my changes. For the current time being I'm driving the tubes with a MidiBox project kit. I plan to move to driving them with a printer port on the computer, and the midibox kit wasn't ment to have that many "notes" driven at once and seems to reset channels unexpectantly. There are pictures of the raw blaze kit HERE There are progress logs / pictures of my hacks HERE And I must say, taking apart the blaze tubes is NOT FUN. These things are made in such a manner that they are practically indestructable. When they say you can submerge them in water, they aren't lying. I had to dremel out the end of the tube, and then put a smaller hole in the other side to break the board free. Good thing they will be under the car. Oh, and I'm not 100% sure about the laws in VA. These things are normally used by young people, and we know what old lawmaking farts think about young people. So they are illegal to use in motion. Oh, and the vehicle probably won't pass inspection with them in place. So the question is, when parked -- are they illegal? They shouldn't be, as your not in motion. RANT ON Yea, some people will groan they are hideous. People cry, "IT'S A DISTRACTION." My thought? If you can't operate a car without being distracted by simple things, then you shouldn't be driving. The new hot vehicle is a distraction. They don't outlaw H2's. Hot chicks walking down the street, distraction. Anything can be a distraction. If you can't deal with it, then you shouldn't be driving. Nothing better than the hypocrites crying about loud car stereo systems (a fad that is mostly gone, replaced by the import mod trend) but they LIKE the loud motorcycles or cars. Or the soccer mom driving the econobox crushing SUV, talking on a cell phone stuffing her face with a McSalad all up over my line. Just old people ruining fun for young people... that is what it's about. END RANT |