Monday, September 01, 2008 - 05:20 am, by: Peter Nitschke(Pen)
Kindly provided by Jason Munro.
What follows, is a step by step pictographic tutorial on how I changed my Climate control unit to electroluminescent backlighting.
If you choose to follow this tutorial, you do so at your own risk. I will take no responsibility if you screw up your unit trying the same modification.
First, start by removing the unit from the car (obviously) there are plenty of tutorials on how to Remove the unit from the car, so I will not go into that here.
To avoid any possible confusion here, I will state that two different climate control units Were used in the creation of this tutorial. One had a working LCD, but no backlighting, the other had backlighting, but the LCD was blacked out. This will explain why the LCD is blacked out in some pictures and not in others. It was not damaged in the process of this tutorial.
Now that the formalities are over, let’s begin..
Step 1
Start with a removed unit.
Step 2
Remove the two screws circled in red.
Step 3
Slice through the material on the join between the front and rear sections of the unit. (Both sides)
Step 4
On the underside of the unit, carefully prize the three tabs open. They are indicated by the red arrows.
Step 5
There are also three tabs on the top of the unit, but these will come apart easily once you have the three bottom ones open. Once the three on the bottom are open, gently tilt the bottom front of the unit up and away from the rear half. Then you will be able to remove the top three tabs. BE CAREFUL. The front is still attached to the rear by two ribbon cables.
Slide it open gently. This is a view from underneath showing the unit being opened.
Step 6
Unplug the two ribbon cables that connect the front half to the rear half of the unit. Put the rear half aside, you will not need it again, until much later. The two cables are indicated by the red arrows. Be careful when unplugging these cables, as they can be very tight.
You should now have the front display section looking like this.
Step 7
Remove the two screws indicated by the red arrows.
Step 8
Carefully lift the white plastic housing that you just removed the screws from. You will notice that it holds the light bulbs for the button illumination, and is attached to the display by a thin ribbon at one end. Carefully unplug this ribbon.
You will now have the button illumination module separated and looking like this - back.
Front.
Note. Now is the time to replace the lighting for the buttons with leds, or stock globes. Once again, there are many tutorials out there on how to do this, so I will not go into it here.
Step 9
While applying slight pressure to the buttons on the display section, gently prize the 4 tabs open. These tabs are indicated by red arrows. This will allow the display unit to separate from the front housing that holds the buttons.
You should now have the display unit with the LCD on it looking like this.
If your LCD is damaged as in the above example, you will now unsolder it, and be ready to replace it with your new one.
IF ON THE OTHER HAND, your LCD is NOT damaged, there is an alternative. I did not unsolder mine. Some people will have problems with the way I did mine, but it worked well, and did not damage the LCD in any way. If you want, you can unsolder your LCD, but this will add a considerable amount of time to the job. YOUR CALL.
Here is what I did next.
Step 10
Undo both screws circled in red. This will allow the LCD holder to separate from the PCB.
Then VERY CAREFULLY lift and bend the pins that run from the PCB to the LCD. There is a tab under the LCD roughly in the center (indicated by red arrow) this will need to Be unclipped to allow the plastic backing to be removed from the LCD.
You will now have a PCB and LCD that looks like the following.
You will also have the plastic backing free from the LCD looking like this. It has the light diffuser in it; this is just sitting in place (it was on mine anyway).
Step 11
Remove the stock globes. Removal is a simple matter of de soldering the globes at these three places.
Step 12
Take the EL strip that you have, in your choice of colors. I chose the blue one. They come in many colors. The place that I got mine from had three choices, red, white and blue. The blue is more of an aqua blue than straight blue. The white is more of an off white or warm white, while the red is more pinkish.
Details of where I got the EL panels from will be provided at the end of this tutorial.
For those that are not aware, EL panels or electroluminescent panels, are super thin sheets that will illuminate when supplied with power, the downside of these panels is that they require high voltage A/C, not the 12V D/C that we have in cars. This means a small inverter is required to run the panel.
The panels that I used here require 100V A/C at 400 HZ to illuminate. The inverter is supplied with the panel that I bought.
EL panels can be cut and bent (carefully) to almost any shape and size, and still light up ! This makes them very useful indeed. As long as you still have an anode and a cathode connected to power the panel, it will still light up.
EL panels are fragile, and if bent too much, you can break the electrical connections, and then only part of the panel will light up. So be careful when bending as you will often only have one shot at getting it right.
The panels I bought are excessively large as supplied. So you will need to cut them down to size.
Cut the panel to 22mm high x 155mm long.
Below you can see the EL panel in blue, and the required inverter.
Next picture shows the EL panel cut to the required size.
Note. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you cut the Panel to size WITH the power connector attached, or you will end up with a panel that is useless! You can see the power connector in black on the left side in the above pictures.
Also IMPORTANT. The trimmed sides WILL BE CONDUCTIVE. Make sure you DO NOT TOUCH THEM WHEN THE PANEL IS ILLUMINATED. YOU MIGHT GET A NASTY 100V SHOCK!
The trimmed sides are indicated by the red arrows in the above picture.
The panels can be cut with a sharp utility knife, or scissors. Remember the golden rule, Measure twice, cut once..
You are aiming for a panel that is the same dimensions as the LCD itself.
Step 13
Find some polystyrene foam from somewhere. I used an old packing box. Cut a piece from it to the following size. 20mm x 24mm x 155mm.
The polystyrene block will be used as the support for the LCD and allow the sandwich of the EL panel that we require in order to get a nice even illumination on the LCD.
Step 14
Take the trimmed EL panel, and make some insulation for the edge that you just trimmed. See the following pictures for details.
Use electrical tape, and stick it to the cut edge as above. Do not cover up too much of the panel. Stick the rest to the rear of the panel as below.
The reason for the tape is so that the conductive cut edge does not come into contact with the pins of the LCD. (That would be BAD!)
Step 15
Take the board that holds the LCD, and VERY CAREFULLY trim a small part of the PCB away. I used a very sharp pair of curved scissors to do this.
This is done to allow the power wires to pass the edge without being pinched.
Peter Nitschke Junk Filterer South Australia UZZ30 UZZ31
Monday, September 01, 2008 - 05:37 am, by: Peter Nitschke(Pen)
Step 16
Take your cut, and insulated EL strip, and sandwich it between the foam and the LCD as shown below. DO NOT REMOVE the white Backing from the LCD.
Note the position of the power connector to the EL panel. This will tell you where you need to trim the PCB to allow clearance for the wires.
Very carefully bend the power connector so that it is almost (not completely) perpendicular to the foam block. Then slide the LCD and PCB into the front half of the case, and screw the board back to the case.
Note that the button illumination module needs to be screwed on at this time, as it holds the LCD / PCB to the front half of the case.
I replaced the stock incandescent lighting with T5 Neo Wedge LED’s in Spark Blue.
I test powered on the bench, so I could see if the led’s would be bright enough, without being too bright. I think they will be perfect.
Note that as the leds are polarized, you may have to pull the unit apart again, if some of them do not light up, you will have to half rotate the leds in the holder.
Step 17
Take the rear half of the climate module, and undo the four screws that hold the two boards in place. Slide the boards out, and insert the inverter in between the two, then slide them back Into the housing, and screw them back in place.
See the following pics for details.
You may or may not have to do this, as it will depend on the size of the inverter that you use to power the panel. If it’s small enough, just slide it in place, it’s not going to rattle, or move anywhere.
Step 18
Drill a small hole in the case to allow the power wires for the inverter to pass through the case.
Now plug the inverter into the EL panel, plug the two ribbon cables back into the rear half of the module, and slide the two halves back together. Make sure that you do not pinch any of the wires that you will have to bunch up inside the unit.
Replace the 2 screws that hold the two halves together. If you have a 12 Volt supply, you can now test power the EL panel to see how it looks! Note, it’s only the El panel that’s powered in this picture, not the buttons or the climate unit itself.
It is actually a little more blue than in the above picture.
Step 19
Almost finished !
Re install the unit into the car (but do not screw it in place yet), and connect the plugs from the cars factory harness.
Once this is done, turn the ignition on, and see if all or any of the buttons light up ok. If some do not light up, make note of which ones and pull it out of the car again.
Disassemble the unit again. This time only so you can get at the button illumination module. Half rotate the led(s) that did not light up. This will reverse the polarity, and they should now all light up.
Step 20
Extend the wires from the inverter, and wire them to either an ignition switched power source, Meaning the EL panel will light up when ever the ignition is on (as I did), or wire it to the lighting circuit, so that it only lights up when you have the lights on.
It does not really matter which way you go, it’s really personal choice here. The El panel has a half life of approx 3000 hours, so in normal use it should outlast the car.
Screw it all back together again, and you are done..
Pic is a little blurry as it’s difficult to get a good pic without the flash.
I am very happy with the end result.
I hope that you find this interesting and or helpful.
Thursday, March 26, 2009 - 11:44 pm, by: Ashley Leach(Ashlar)
Couldn't you just wire the inverter to an old stock globe position? It my theory that should supply 12v in the lighting circuit or am i not getting this?
Friday, March 27, 2009 - 12:26 am, by: Jason Munro(Jason_munro)
i recently did just that. mine is now wired to power the inverter only when the lights are on.
i was going to try to power the inverter via one of the stock globes inside the climate unit, but as normal incandescent globes are not polarity sensitive, and the inverter is, i had no way to know what side was positive and what was negative inside the module.
so mine is still powered externally. if you figured out what was pos and what was neg, you could easily power the inverter internally.