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With Pistolpete's inspiration, added led strips to the footwells, storage area and doors. Mostly wanted more interior light with the doors open and liked his idea of the puddle light with the doors. Remote controlled to whatever color you want and then when doors open all lights turn to white.
To start with I used an OPT7 Aura 6 piece interior LED strip kit. I has 6-12" RGB led strips, a controller box which can be hardwired and a wireless remote. The most important feature to me was that it offered a "door assist" option, which when wired into a courtesy light will turn all of the lights on white. I planned to use 1 strip for each footwell, 2 in the rear compartment and 1 in each door. I have a bluetooth amp for the stereo of which the controller was fit to the ashtray space under the door, so I do not have the lighter hooked up any more. I needed a constant 12v source so the unit would have power when the doors were open so I used that, with an inline fuse, and grounded the unit to the shifter console ground. I located the unit under the stock radio in the shifter console. From there is was just fishing wires to the rear and attaching the lights to the trim and securing wires so they would not be seen, I ran the wires under the parking brake console under the carpet to the passenger quarter panel and up. I just secured them with the existing tape for now and they appear to be holding well. The footwell lights are mostly self explanatory, find somewhere to mount them and run the 2' of wire to the control box in the shifter console. That was all of the easy part. Before I took the effort to run the wires into the doors I wanted to make sure the "door assist" feature would work, as with the doors open would be the only time you see the door lights. The door assist requires a power and ground connection, it is switched on by the positive lead. Most people just connect it to one of their interior lights for the signal. At least in my 1975 C3 the courtesy lights are switched by a ground loop, when the door opens the switch completes the ground circuit. So I used a SPDT relay to control the positive signal based on the ground status of the circuit. The door assist positive wire was connected to the relay output, power from the fused lighter power wire was placed on the inputs of the relay and the switch side of the relay was wired to the negative lead from the driver side courtesy light. The ground wire from the door assist wires was grounded to the shifter console ground. After testing that feature worked the wires to the doors were run. I had to remove the rubber boot from the body to the door, which I learned is called a "Power Window Wire Conduit", then used a small wire to fish the led light wire through and reconnect the conduit, that was not fun. To get it through the conduit I had to cut the harness end going to the lights off. Once it was routed through the conduit and into the door the 4 wires for the led lights were soldered back together. It appeared Pistolpete attached his lights to the metal on the bottom of the door and had enough room to clear the door sill, my lights appeared thicker and I didn't want to take a chance on them getting caught in the door sill. My door panels are old and torn up and need to be replaced so I figured I would see if I could attach the lights to them. So I cut the covering and foam on the bottom side of the door panel to accept the light, drilled a hole through the same section to allow the wiring harness to reside behind the door panel. Then since I plan on replacing the door panels and didn't want a super permanent fixture for now I just hot glued the strips to the door panel, connected the harnesses and buttoned everything up. The bottom of the door panel is not a showroom appearance, so don't judge please, I was doing this as a mock up to make sure it would work before cutting new door panels. Overall pleased with the outcome, be glad to answer any questions if it would help.
LED light control box wired to relay LED light strip inset in base of door panel wire harness coming from the door
So I'm working on this but wondering how exactly you wired the door assist feature? meaning which wire / switch is connected to the door open / close. My other thought is using a micro magnetic switch and wiring this up myself...
Originally Posted by kkerley
To start with I used an OPT7 Aura 6 piece interior LED strip kit. I has 6-12" RGB led strips, a controller box which can be hardwired and a wireless remote. The most important feature to me was that it offered a "door assist" option, which when wired into a courtesy light will turn all of the lights on white. I planned to use 1 strip for each footwell, 2 in the rear compartment and 1 in each door. I have a bluetooth amp for the stereo of which the controller was fit to the ashtray space under the door, so I do not have the lighter hooked up any more. I needed a constant 12v source so the unit would have power when the doors were open so I used that, with an inline fuse, and grounded the unit to the shifter console ground. I located the unit under the stock radio in the shifter console. From there is was just fishing wires to the rear and attaching the lights to the trim and securing wires so they would not be seen, I ran the wires under the parking brake console under the carpet to the passenger quarter panel and up. I just secured them with the existing tape for now and they appear to be holding well. The footwell lights are mostly self explanatory, find somewhere to mount them and run the 2' of wire to the control box in the shifter console. That was all of the easy part. Before I took the effort to run the wires into the doors I wanted to make sure the "door assist" feature would work, as with the doors open would be the only time you see the door lights. The door assist requires a power and ground connection, it is switched on by the positive lead. Most people just connect it to one of their interior lights for the signal. At least in my 1975 C3 the courtesy lights are switched by a ground loop, when the door opens the switch completes the ground circuit. So I used a SPDT relay to control the positive signal based on the ground status of the circuit. The door assist positive wire was connected to the relay output, power from the fused lighter power wire was placed on the inputs of the relay and the switch side of the relay was wired to the negative lead from the driver side courtesy light. The ground wire from the door assist wires was grounded to the shifter console ground. After testing that feature worked the wires to the doors were run. I had to remove the rubber boot from the body to the door, which I learned is called a "Power Window Wire Conduit", then used a small wire to fish the led light wire through and reconnect the conduit, that was not fun. To get it through the conduit I had to cut the harness end going to the lights off. Once it was routed through the conduit and into the door the 4 wires for the led lights were soldered back together. It appeared Pistolpete attached his lights to the metal on the bottom of the door and had enough room to clear the door sill, my lights appeared thicker and I didn't want to take a chance on them getting caught in the door sill. My door panels are old and torn up and need to be replaced so I figured I would see if I could attach the lights to them. So I cut the covering and foam on the bottom side of the door panel to accept the light, drilled a hole through the same section to allow the wiring harness to reside behind the door panel. Then since I plan on replacing the door panels and didn't want a super permanent fixture for now I just hot glued the strips to the door panel, connected the harnesses and buttoned everything up. The bottom of the door panel is not a showroom appearance, so don't judge please, I was doing this as a mock up to make sure it would work before cutting new door panels. Overall pleased with the outcome, be glad to answer any questions if it would help.
With Pistolpete's inspiration, added led strips to the footwells, storage area and doors. Mostly wanted more interior light with the doors open and liked his idea of the puddle light with the doors. Remote controlled to whatever color you want and then when doors open all lights turn to white.
Puddle is right. Very cool! It looks like Cherenkov radiation.
So the door assist feature requires a ground and switched power. The switched power tells the control unit to switch all the lights to white when power is transmitted. In my 75, and I would assume most C3s, the courtesy lights are switched on and off by a ground signal, there is a little push-pin switch in the front of the door jamb. When the door is opened the ground loop is completed and the courtesy lights turn on. So the car provides a negative switch to turn on the lights and the led lights require a positive switch. So using a SPDT relay, it has a power in, power out, and a trigger lead. The car’s constant 12v power was supplied to the power in (86 and 30), power out (87) went to the led control unit, the trigger wire (85) was tapped into the wire from the push pin switch in the door jamb. So when the door was opened the relay would see a signal to tell it to send power through, or another way the trigger from the ground wire was used as a switch for the switched power circuit which powers the door assist feature. And no I am not an electrical engineer so my terms of circuits, switches, etc are probably not accurate of the definitions, so to those more electrically inclined sorry for butchering your terminology. Hope that helps you want more specifics of part #s let me know.
LED Mod (copying Pistolpete)
It looks like Cherenkov radiation.
