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Old 03-13-2018, 10:16 AM   #1
David C
 
Drives: White '07 3dr LB
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Increasing head lights output (full LED setup)

Yesterday I received and installed the Novsight H4 LED bulbs (60w/10 000lm/pair) and the Morimoto XB LED foglights (18w/2400lm/pair) on my '07 HB. I already had Phillips 194 LED bulbs in the parking lights, two 9w "rock light" pods and two 30w LED spot bars in the lower grill. Wired the parking lights as my DRL, the LED bar with the high beam and the fog with the low beam. Pods come on with tail lights.

Light output with high quality H4 halogen was still very bad, so I was looking for ways to improve the usable light output of the car without going through a projector retrofit and expensive HID, which was my last resort if the new lights weren't gonna cut it.

I'm happy to report that the Morimoto foglights are badass and really do light up the road ahead with a very nice slim and wide beam that stays on the ground and fill in the lack of ground light from the headlights. The H4 LED has a very similar cutoff as the halogen but with much more light produced and doesn't blind despite a little more intense spills.

Now I don't feel like I'm driving with the lights off anymore, which was how I often felt with the halogen (and no fog). Driving in country roads this weekend with the washout grey pavement and lots of sneaky hills and turns even the high beams were a joke. Lucky I had the LED bars installed already, because the headlights were just not lighting up the road right in front to be safe to drive at night. On the flat highway it was okay, the road being more reflective and open, but still wasn't as good as it should be.

Here you can see the beam of the foglight, it's really wide and slim, keeps all the light on the ground where you want it.

I'll get more pictures of the full light setup and beams/cutoff soon.

IMG_2329.JPG
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Old 03-13-2018, 10:21 AM   #2
David C
 
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Increasing head lights output (full LED setup)

Here's a video of how bad the halogen setup was on Saturday night :

https://youtu.be/eCYTyJ-l-BE

The video exposure is pretty spot on, as in what you can make out of the road in the video is actually what you were able to see in real life.
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Old 03-14-2018, 03:29 AM   #3
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Are these just drop in replacements?
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Old 03-14-2018, 10:32 AM   #4
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Yes they are.
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Old 03-14-2018, 11:20 AM   #5
David C
 
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I bought these Novsight H4 LED on Amazon.ca

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B076DVP4Q2

However there's bunch of other ones available. Just make sure if you buy H4 bulbs that they have the light shield on the top row led chips (those are the rows that light up on low beam) to prevent light from shining upward and loosing the cutoff of the reflector housing. I got the ones above so I could use the harness to splice in fog lights on the low and led bars on the high (removed the gold things which are just resistors). Also not sure if the ones without fan would get enough air to evacuate the heat due to the rubber grommet partially covering the heat sink. They do flicker on DRL (Morimoto fogs do too) so I disconnected the DRL relay from under the dash and wired my parking lights to the Gauge circuit which is on when the key is on "Run".
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Old 03-14-2018, 07:17 PM   #6
IllusionX
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Told you need to add a capacitor to the DRL source to stop the flicker

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Old 03-14-2018, 07:34 PM   #7
David C
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by IllusionX View Post
Told you need to add a capacitor to the DRL source to stop the flicker

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The DRL relay is simply a triac in serie of a parallel ground of the low beam that takes about 3.5v off the line. Since I have LED's everywhere on the low and high, no point in running them at a lesser voltage. Much easier to just disconnect the relay and wire in the parking lights or any other light from an ignition circuit, so you still get DRL whenever the key is on run even without the engine running, but you don't necessarily get stuck with headlight power when you want to drive around quietly (like drive in theaters or outdoor exhibits). And it's quite a bitch to wire anything to that DRL harness due to its location and how short the harness is. In my case Im happy with the way it is after giving it much thoughts. However I picked up high amp diodes to have a parallel ground for the LED light bars and the foglights on a switch on the dashboard, so I can turn them on independently of the high/low beams too.
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Old 03-14-2018, 07:35 PM   #8
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And btw are you running LED foglights assembly or just LED bulbs in your fogs ?
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Old 03-14-2018, 07:38 PM   #9
IllusionX
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I'm using something like this.

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Old 03-14-2018, 07:40 PM   #10
IllusionX
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David C View Post
The DRL relay is simply a triac in serie of a parallel ground of the low beam that takes about 3.5v off the line. Since I have LED's everywhere on the low and high, no point in running them at a lesser voltage. Much easier to just disconnect the relay and wire in the parking lights or any other light from an ignition circuit, so you still get DRL whenever the key is on run even without the engine running, but you don't necessarily get stuck with headlight power when you want to drive around quietly (like drive in theaters or outdoor exhibits). And it's quite a bitch to wire anything to that DRL harness due to its location and how short the harness is. In my case Im happy with the way it is after giving it much thoughts. However I picked up high amp diodes to have a parallel ground for the LED light bars and the foglights on a switch on the dashboard, so I can turn them on independently of the high/low beams too.
Huh? Last time I measure the voltage out of the DRL at the H4 harness, I was getting 12v.

I was like, fine, connect the blue wire to the orange wire of the fogs, then fog relay started flicker. A small cap solved the issue.

I believe you also lose the parking brake light on the dash when you remove the module.
Oh yeah, I can also control my fogs independently from the headlights as long as the DRL works. :)

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Old 03-14-2018, 08:10 PM   #11
David C
 
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Increasing head lights output (full LED setup)

Quote:
Originally Posted by IllusionX View Post
Huh? Last time I measure the voltage out of the DRL at the H4 harness, I was getting 12v.

I was like, fine, connect the blue wire to the orange wire of the fogs, then fog relay started flicker. A small cap solved the issue.

I believe you also lose the parking brake light on the dash when you remove the module.
Oh yeah, I can also control my fogs independently from the headlights as long as the DRL works.

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In your case you had factory foglight, so you have a dedicated switch and relay, harness, etc. I don't, so it's a user install and I have to wire them with power, ground and control. So I chose to use the constant 12v from the headlight and the controlled ground of the low beam.

When I measured the voltage at the H4 connector on passenger side, with the driver side halogen bulb in, passenger side bulb out, engine off, key out, lights to off, I was getting 12v to a ground point from all 3 wires and 0v between each. With the lights on to "head", I'm getting 12v from main to low and 12v from main to ground point, 0v from main to high. With the engine running and light to off, I was getting 11v between main and low, 14v from main to ground, 14v from high to ground, 0v from main to high and 3v from low to ground. My true RMS meter was giving me 3v DC or 5v AC and a 50hz frequency, which shows the pulsing effect. Since the LED units use their own driver to stabilize current and voltage, I didn't deemed a good practice to add a non linear load in series with the LED drivers. Of course a capacitor would help smooth the pulsing, but I don't want to be running the headlights all the time now when the parking lights do just fine. However I might wire the fog ground to the headlight switch stack so they come on when I switch to tail and then the headlight join in when I go to head.

Parking brake light is always on anyway since I have the abs light too.

So in my case it's fine the way it is.
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Old 03-14-2018, 11:25 PM   #12
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Increasing head lights output (full LED setup)

Found a dark place I could get a good idea of the aim. Leveled the car, 25ft to target, laser line on bulbs height and the vertical aiming was spot on. However I may have a slight horizontal misalignment which I'll have to find a better place to fine tune in the future. Nothing blinding tho. Also adjusted the fog upward to the proper height. These Morimoto projector LED foglights are sweet, at 9w each and 1 200lm, they light up the road beautifully, and they are so wide it's a treat to drive around the city.

The Led h4 also have a far more powerful output than the halogen, and checking with several people as I drove toward them, they don't feel like I'm shining to strong or blinding them. Even myself I can hardly get blinded when crouching down to look at the beam itself, and my eyes are very sensitive to light.

Last edited by David C; 03-15-2018 at 12:07 AM.
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Old 03-14-2018, 11:56 PM   #13
ACKING_QC
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attachement fail cant see them
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Old 03-15-2018, 12:07 AM   #14
David C
 
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Second picture I turned down the exposure in post to make out the cutoff more visible since my phone wasn't picking it up as it was in real life.

IMG_2338.JPG
IMG_2339.JPG
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Old 03-16-2018, 04:59 PM   #15
IllusionX
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Hmm weird. It doesn't cut off nearly as sharp as my sedan.

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Old 03-16-2018, 05:20 PM   #16
David C
 
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Originally Posted by IllusionX View Post
Hmm weird. It doesn't cut off nearly as sharp as my sedan.

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Well there's a few factors to consider here :

The headlight bulb is 25' (measured) from the white glossy garage door that isn't perfectly flat, so it gives some ripples, the headlights lens and reflectors are rather hold (I suspect they are still the stock ones as they are Toyota and doesn't look new enough to have been replaced in the last years), the phone is picking up a lot of ambient yellow light and artifacts, as I'm under a bridge.

But yes the beam pattern of the headlights is not very neat and smooth as you would get from HID projectors, and it's rather intense in the middle, but observing closely one side at the time, the cut off line is there. It's just the white beam is so intense on the white gloss background that it spills over the cutoff line. Using a black EVA foam floor mat, the light pattern is a lot easier to observe.

The LED light shields may also be producing artifacts by being just a folded over thin sheet rather than a polished cup like the halogen bulbs.

Yesterday I wired the fogs out of the low beam and into the taillight switch along with a parallel switched ground on my left dashboard (next to the mirror adjustment switch). In the city, the fog are plenty thanks to the nice and low wide beam, it's almost like having a projector headlight but 1~2 feet off the ground instead of shining up to people's side mirrors. I'm almost tempted to aim the headlights a tad lower than recommended so they actually will shine on the road more now that they have a longer reach with the led wavelength.
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Old 03-17-2018, 09:12 AM   #17
IllusionX
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Weird. My light pattern is very neat. Better than what it looked like with HID.

Here is my LED setup..

On the road



Low beam


Fogs only


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Old 04-01-2018, 02:44 PM   #18
David C
 
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I had a chance to do fine tuning this weekend with the car leveled and laser line level to aim the vertical axis of the headlights. Then a lot of driving in pitch dark roads with lots of hills and curves to see how they performed.

Fogs only really cover the low speed driving (<40km/h) nicely in term of how far down they effectively light up and bonus they don't glare at all so when you get incoming traffic or following traffic you can run the fogs only to minimize light pollution to other road users (not limited to drivers, but cyclists and pedestrians too).

The low beams add a lot more light on the road and reach far just enough (could be better with projectors) to make it safe to drive moderate to high speeds and do light up any reflective signs very far away, including possible moving objects such as pedestrians with reflective stripes/jackets, bikes with reflectors, animals eyes, etc).

The high beams paired with the spot led bars really leave no darkness as far as the eye can see, with the intense spot beam of the led bars smoothing over the distance and piercing trough fog due to being mounted low to the ground (same height as the fog lights). Makes for a very safe driving at higher speeds thanks to how far you can see details. By higher speeds I mean driving as fast as you would normally do in daytime on the same roads, not speeding.

I'll post a recording of my dash cam when I get home.

Here's 3 pics of the fog/fog+low beam/fog+high beam+led bars taken in total pitch darkness. Pointless of taking a picture without the lights as the eye couldn't see a thing, much less the camera on my phone.

IMG_2409.JPG
IMG_2410.JPG
IMG_2411.JPG
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