My Car Has Eyebrows Now

I have a 2006 Nissan Altima and it's a pretty boring car. I noticed that newer cars these days all have the led running lights. And you know what, i think they look awesome.

So my first instinct was that it's time to get to eBay and find some of these for my car. Unfortunately that didn't happen since pretty much the only headlight options for a 2006 Nissan Altima are the stock lights or some overpriced projectors. I had recently used a headlight restoration kit (which worked very well) so I didn't really need to replace my lights.

Here comes the ghetto part. I got on Amazon and ordered some 12 volt LED strip lights that were waterproof. Strip lights are very cool because you can cut them to length and they take a decent voltage range out of the box (resistors already on ths strip).

So I bought the "pure white" led lights but when they came in, to my dismay they were a tinge of blue. I got lazy and decided to just go with it. I regret that decision but if I want to redo it in the future it will be easy.


The first task was mounting. I wanted them along the edge of the headlight but not to be easily visible. The options were to open the light and glue it in and reseal the light (seemed like a lot of work), glue to the outside (would look tacky), or the final option I went with which was mount on top of the light but under the hood.



Mounting here proved easy and still let enough light out to be noticeable. These aren't super LED's in the strip for $6, so daytime they are pretty dim. But they work. So I cut strips and glued in place with a waterproof silicon glue.

Next was figuring out how to turn them on and off. Now, my headlights have an on off feature for when it gets too dark. I could tie the LED's in to that but then they would only be on at night with the headlights. I wanted them on as long as the car remained on. Another option was to add a switch in place for them and wire it to the battery. But in that case, I would have to remember to turn them on and off every time I drove. So that was out. When you're dealing with a battery, you have a constant supply of power, so I had to find a smart way for the car to turn the lights on an off for me.

So I was thinking about creating crazy switches and circuits to detect of the car was running but I ended up finding an incredibly easy way to accomplish this. If you turn your car and and think what electrical systems go on/off when the car is running you can quickly guess the radio. Having hooked up many stereos in the past, it finally clicked what I could do.

The stereo in a car is considered an accessory. And most people will notice that their key positions has an accessory position on it that gets turned on when the car turns on. So by tapping in to that accessory power line, I can turn anything on and off based n if the car is on or off.

Yeah, zipties

So I bought a 12 volt car relay and a fuse block (always use fuses, especially when you are rigging up something) and installed it to the led strips and hooked it to the battery. I then ran the coil power to it from the Power line running to the car stereo. This means I could power the LED strips and in the future fog lights, with using very little power from the stereos circuit.




Once it's all wired up, I now have my own ghetto LED light-blueish running lights.

I had a lot of led strip left over so I ditched the old yellow bulb courtesy lights and glued the strips in place under the doors. Used wire taps foe the factory courtesy lights to run these so everything just worked.