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I am swapping out my incandescent interior lighting for LED equivalents. In the process I've disconnected the battery and disassembled a lot of the interior. My question is specific about how to test the lighting only (does it light up or not), when a component is out of the car. As an example, I've pulled the DIC control out of the gauge cluster (and the cluster itself is out of the car on my kitchen table). How can I hook up a spare car battery to test the functionality of the new bulbs in the DIC? I don't know which pins to hook the negative and positive terminals to. I've successfully done this with the active handling/selective ride module from the center console, but can't figure it out for the DIC or the HUD controls. I've downloaded the schematic for both of them showing the pinouts I found here on this forum, but I can't seem to make it work. Any help would be appreciated...
I never could get this to work using any of the pins above, so what I did was simply apply pos to one pole of one of the incandescent bulbs while it was plugged into the back and the neg to the other pole. All the bulbs came on once I did that. Then, I replaced each bulb one at a time with an LED and re-tested the lights the same way. On the occasions where the LED didn't come on during testing, I knew I had the polarity switched so I spun it 180 degrees and re-tested. I repeated that until I had all the LEDs in and functioning. That way, I know once I plug the car's harness back into the gauge cluster, all will work as intended without ever having to remove the cluster again, because that stupid thing is a b**** to get in and out!
Anyway, that's how I tested the lights for polarity and conductivity before putting it all back in the car.