12v 2 input to led bar

Thread Starter

Rbjohnson78

Joined Nov 10, 2020
5
I have some ambient lighting in my vehicle that turns on when my door is open and while the vehicle is running. I want to mimic this behavior. since the lighting I want to mimic is controlled somewhere that changes the light colors, I don't think tapping into those would work.

So I want to take the power from my foot well lighting and cluster lights, and use those to power some led strips I added. The foot well comes on when the door opens and the cluster kicks in when the vehicle is on.

So how can I safety use power from 2 sources to power the leds?

Thanks for the help! I hope this makes sense.
 

SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,031
You use a relay instead of driving them directly not knowing what power load is already on the well/cluster circuit. Or else you find the fuse for those circuits, remove the fuse and put an ammeter into the circuit and see how much load there is compared to the fuse rating and decide if there is enough overhead to add the additional lights to the circuit directly without blowing the fuse by overloading the circuit.
 

DarthVolta

Joined Jan 27, 2015
521
So what's the voltage/current/power rating, of the foot well lighting and cluster lights? What type of strip lights do you have? How many LED's in series and or parallel ? Do they have their own voltage regulator/power supply ?
 

Thread Starter

Rbjohnson78

Joined Nov 10, 2020
5
The leds all feed Into a Bluetooth module that controls them. The power requirement I imagine is very low, 10v-16v and probably an Amp or less for draw. Both the well and cluster output is 12v. Draw for each of these is low as well. Don't have exact numbers.
 
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