Red ambient lights rear and dash

[nomunic]

Hey guys, I’m currently installing an ali express red ambient light kit for my rear doors and dash. The light looks pretty good, I’m hoping others will follow me.

I’ve ran into an issue, sadly.

The lights in the rear only stay on when I have the cars headlights to the off position. The lights also come on when I do a full press on the window switch and turn off when I let go.

From these photos I received through the manufacturer, I decided that I would depin the brown connector and replace it with the included orange connector, then also depin the beige connector in position 4 of the clip and replace it with the gray from the provided kit. After that I just plugged it all in. Where’s my issue?

 

[Cuzoe]

I won't get a chance to look at some wiring diagrams until sometime tomorrow morning.

If you can send a link to whatever kit you ordered that might be helpful.

Which plug(s) are you tapped into? With anything you're going to need a ground. And then you're going to need power which I would guess is tapped into the pin that provides lighting for the window switch.

 

[nomunic]

I won't get a chance to look at some wiring diagrams until sometime tomorrow morning.

If you can send a link to whatever kit you ordered that might be helpful.

Which plug(s) are you tapped into? With anything you're going to need a ground. And then you're going to need power which I would guess is tapped into the pin that provides lighting for the window switch.

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I assumed the window switch had all the necessary plugs. Right now I have it where I’ve swapped the brown and beige wires with gray and orange.

 

[Cuzoe]

I'm not sure what you mean by swapped wires or by replacing anything with an orange connector (I assume included with the kit), but I would start with putting the wires back as you found them.

This is what you want it to look like...

 

[madwazzabi]

I believe you're tapping from the power that provides the window button power and the up/down trigger for the motor and it come from the regulator motor. This shouldn't be where you get power and it should be upstream of the window regulator motor.

I would also recommend you not mix lighting with motor loads (call me old school). What I did was run my footwell lighting circuit through the door connector and feed the door LED that way. My install is posted here https://golfmk7.com/forums/index.ph...light-above-the-glove-box.401423/post-7871549 and included a wiring diagram of where I spliced. you only need to bring one wire to each door for the power, you can steal the common conductor (brown/grey) from any of the rear door circuit. This also has the benefit if you have ambient lighting package already you'll get all the fade and dim effects.

 

[Cuzoe]

Agreed with @madwazzabi, you don't want to touch pin 1 on the window switch. Pin 4 is Terminal 58x which is interior lighting... exactly what you want for power, as your added red lights should now dim/brighten with the rest of the interior lighting (via the dial by the light switch).

 

[nomunic]

I believe you're tapping from the power that provides the window button power and the up/down trigger for the motor and it come from the regulator motor. This shouldn't be where you get power and it should be upstream of the window regulator motor.

View attachment 300030

I would also recommend you not mix lighting with motor loads (call me old school). What I did was run my footwell lighting circuit through the door connector and feed the door LED that way. My install is posted here https://golfmk7.com/forums/index.ph...light-above-the-glove-box.401423/post-7871549 and included a wiring diagram of where I spliced. you only need to bring one wire to each door for the power, you can steal the common conductor (brown/grey) from any of the rear door circuit. This also has the benefit if you have ambient lighting package already you'll get all the fade and dim effects.

I’ll def need to tackle this eventually, I just need my door panels back on . This is really similar to the rgb ambient lighting I did with my brother on the 535i. Felt a bit better about that job.

I’ve plugged the tap here with wires 3 and 4.


Trying to remain consistent, I plugged the gray wire from the tap into the third port on the oem harness. (Brown to gray, gray to oem port 3).

I then plugged the orange wire into port 4 on the oem harness. (White/beige to orange, orange to oem port 4)


This is how the led looks with the orange and gray wires in.

Window works, window switch light works, but LED turns on with window switch and won’t stay on alone. I also found that it stays on with lights off at front switch.

 

[nomunic]

I’m guessing I tried every combination at this point, so it’s possible that this kit just isn’t gonna work through this method

 

[nomunic]

Including a diagram I drew up so I could understand what’s going on. I’m a little slow so bear with me. Here’s what I got:

 

[madwazzabi]

Based on that wiring diagram something does look off. Harness should act as a splice and essentially look like a pass through for the window switch connector with another pair of wires in parallel to feed the LED. To complete the picture you need to include the door side of the wiring and where does that connect to to complete the window switch connector circuit.

 

[Cuzoe]

Based on that wiring diagram something does look off. Harness should act as a splice and essentially look like a pass through for the window switch connector with another pair of wires in parallel to feed the LED. To complete the picture you need to include the door side of the wiring and where does that connect to to complete the window switch connector circuit.

That diagram does show it as a splice with wires in parallel going to the LED.

What is marked as "harness" is the door side. The VW schematic is posted up above. For the window switch pin 4 is the wire for interior lighting. The other two window switch wires come from the window motor.

 

[madwazzabi]

That diagram does show it as a splice with wires in parallel going to the LED.

What is marked as "harness" is the door side. The VW schematic is posted up above. For the window switch pin 4 is the wire for interior lighting. The other two window switch wires come from the window motor.

Your interpretation with the way it is drawn this is what I see, he's scribbled away where the harness spice feeds the new LED (I take this as wires cut, or pins pulled out and put in another connector) and now shows the LED wired in a closed loop with the window switch pin 3 and 4. In that case window and LED would not work at all. I think the wiring diagram is not accurate to what is physically done on the car.

 

[Cuzoe]

@madwazzabi you can very well be right, in which case you were also right that nothing is going to work. I wasn't really sure what those squiggly lines were. I made an unsafe assumption that it was drawn to show that there were two wires coming out.

I made a beautiful microsoft paint drawing up above showing the same thing as this hand drawn diagram, at least I thought so .

 

[FixIt]

I'm about to start the ambient lighting upgrade as well, specifically for the rear doors and above the glove box. A few weeks back I ordered a strip led light for above the glove box. I finally had a chance to try out how well the fiber optics "conduct" the light from the small led emitter and was disappointed how much less it illuminated that fiber when compared to the stock ambient strips on the front doors.

At this point I'm guessing that the led emitter is simply not good (or faulty) as it doesn't light up bright enough at all. When I hold the end of the fiber to the led in my cellphone, it illuminates properly so I'm pretty sure the led is really too dim (Aliexpress). I tried finding these emitters as a separate part but I just can't find them, so I ordered a new ambient lighting set on AliExpress, but this time including the rear doors and again, above the glove box, in the hope that the led's properly illuminate the fiber.
I just picked one fixed color as opposed to RGB, in order to keep things simple for now.

There are small lights in the rear window switches which only turn on when headlights are on, so I'm planning on tying into that but I'll take some measurements to see which wire I need to tie into once I remove the door panel and l'll make some photos at that point as well.

Here are a few pictures of the glove box strip I ordered. The removal process is documented on YouTube and I have plenty of plastic prying tools, but still one of the plastic clups broke off during the removal process. I used a dremel tool to grind away the plastic clips that hold the led fiber in place and used hot glue to mount the new one.

So that part of the process went pretty smooth and it looks pretty much like stock. Now just waiting for the new led emitter to arrive so I can continue with installation...

 

[Cuzoe]

The hard part is getting me LED emitter perfectly lined up with the light pipe. If there's any misalignment the light won't "travel" the way you want. I added lighting to all of my doors and the dash, granted my car did not come with any door lighting. My alignment didn't come out perfect but it's pretty good. I found the dash strip was the most difficult to get aligned.