Running lights

Have I mentioned lately how kickass and brilliant my sweetie is? Because he is.

I’d been feeling invisible from the side lately…I don’t know if it’s just psychological — the Z has the “low beam is one headlight; high beam is both” thing, so I feel like it’s dark on the non-headlight side. But at any rate, I was really lamenting not having running lights on the Z.

So Peter spent his day today helping me figure out how to wire some up.

It wound up being a pretty complicated electronic procedure, complete with big cigar-like resistors. There’ll definitely be a write-up….once I can have Peter proofread it for me. *laughs*

In the meantime, though, here’s the final result!

Here’s the Z with the blinker on:

The only “downside” is that now the blinker lights in the instrument panel are always on, though much dimmer than normal. You can’t see it under direct light, only at night; when the blinker is actually on, too, the instrument light for that blinker is full-power brightness. So really that’s no biggie. Someday we might code up a microcontroller for doing the running lights, and that’ll probably “fix” this…but it’s no problem in the meantime.

Here the lefthand blinker and neutral light are “normal” (i.e. full strength); you can see how the righthand blinker light is still on, though much dimmer:

I’m really thrilled with the result! Write-up to follow…