Topic: Dual projector curve active & horizon active headlamps

[kgschlosser]

This is not something that has been done yet to my knowledge. and definitely not done to a Kappa.

I decided that I wanted to do an HID retrofit to my vehicle and while doing the retrofit I thought to myself I wonder if 2 projectors would fit into the housing. I tested this and got them to fit without to much of a headache. My plan was to modify on of the projectors so it had a shade in it that would fully block the light. Both sets of projectors would be on when the low beam is on  but light would only be seen from one set of the projectors. When the high beams are turned on that is when night would become day and all 4 projectors would be putting out 100% of their light. HID takes a bit to warm up and I didn't want to have the one set of projectors turning on and off when I switch from high to low beam.

So once I discovered that I could fit 2 projectors into each housing I then thought wouldn't it be really cool to make the headlights curve active. And I figured what the hell let step it up one notch more and also make them horizon active.

This is not something you want to do unless you have some serious time to spend working on it. I have a couple hundred hours invested over a 5 month time span. If I remove the trial and error the build price if I did it again would be somewhere between 300.00 and 400.00 per housing including projectors bulbs and ballasts.

I went a bit over the top and also added 42 RGBW pixels (168 LEDs) to be sequential switchback parking light, DRL and turn signal. I also brought the side marker light into it so it is a parking light and turn signal and it has 21 RGBW pixels (84 LEDs).

Each headlamp has the following electronics to control the position of the projectors and the LED's in the headlamp housing and also the marker light.

32 bit dual core RISC  processor running at 240mHz  with 4mb of flash storage and 8mb of memory.
9 DOF (9 axis) MEMS sensor
16 channel PWM servo/stepper motor controller
2 step downs (power supplies) rated for 5v @ 5amps
4 SPDT opto isolated 10 amp relays.
CAN interface
4 metal gear servos that have been modified to provide position
Custom made power distribution/voltage divider PCB


I am using the MEMS sensor to calculate the roll and pitch of the vehicle and the CAN interface to get the steering angle from the EBCM, the gear the car is in from the BCM and the speed the car is moving from the BCM.

I had to make the housing larger in order to fit everything and also to provide enough room for the projectors to move without bumping into anything. The housing is made from the same plastic used in the original housing. Actually part of the housing IS the original, I welded what I made to the original piece using no glues or adhesives and the weld joins the 2 pieces as if they were never 2 pieces to begin with. I built a vacuum forming machine to make the extension part out of a single piece of plastic. There is only a single weld to join the 2 pieces together.

I have about 40? of y axis (up/down) travel and 60? of x axis (left/right) travel. The total range covered between both housings is 90? -45? to 45? with 0? being straight ahead.

The projectors will lift 1? for every 10mph I am doing over 30mph and up to 70mps. so at 60mph the projectors will raise the beam 3?. If I go over a speed bump when the front tires go over the projectors will lower and when the back tires go over they will raise. If i take a corner really hard the headlamp on the outside will raise and the one on the inside will lower to counteract the body roll. The lamps will lower when accelerating hard and raise when breaking hard. They will also turn when the steering angle changes. The projectors will not move left or right when the vehicle is backing up.

[kgschlosser]

here are some photos of the almost complete headlamps.

[kgschlosser]

the ? after the numbers in the first post is the degree symbol apparently the forum doesn't support Ascii characters.

[Critterman]

Sounds very interesting, would like to see the finished project.   By the way you pictures didn't show.

[Sol Asylum]

I can see the pictures.

Quite the project, how close to installed and tested are you? 

[kgschlosser]

I just went through one of the lamps and tested the circuits and made sure everything is how it should be. I have to dial the power supplies into the 5volts they need to be set at.

Because I am running 2 HID ballasts per housing I couldn't use the stock wiring to power them plus the high and low beams turn on and off with toggling of the high beams. HID's take to long to warm up so when the low beams are on they need to be on all the time. So I had to add 2 relays one for each ballast. I wasn't able to get a relay that would be large enough to carry a 30amp load and get triggered using <= 3.3v @ < 60ma. I built voltage dividers that drop a 15 volt input down to 3.3 volts which is the max input voltage that can be fed into one of the inputs on the processor. I have the parking lights, turn signals, high beams, low beams and ignition tied into an array of voltage dividers so  the processor can sense what is on and what is off.

The ignition sense is because of the large amount of electronics in each housing and parasitic current draw. The processor has a deep sleep mode with a 10ua (0.00001 amps) draw, the rest of the electronics don't have sleep modes. One of the power supplies is always going to be powered on to feed power to to the processor. There is a relay off that power supply that turns on and off power to the CAN interface, servo controller, servos, MEMS sensor and is the trigger for another relay. The other relay connects the second power supply to the LED's which have processors in each of the pixels that handle the PWM controlling of the pixel.

I just got finished writing a basic function firmware that will control the relays for the headlights, the controls for handling the LEDs and the nputs from the car. The processor has built in WiFi So I had to code in making one of the processors a WiFi access point that can be connected to. That processor also has a DNS server and a DHCP server so the user is not going to have to do anything when connecting to it. It is also a Web Server that hosts a configuration page so a user can alter things like the colors of the LED's and the speed of the turn signals different animation effects for the LEDs setting the trim for up/down and left/right of the high beams and low beams for each housing. It also has a Websocket Server that the other headlamp processor connects to so config information can be displayed to the user from a single configuration webpage.

Data that is viewed on that config webpage is all real time and any changes made to things like thr trim of the lamps to the colors of the LEDs all happen instantly and the system doesn't need to reboot for anything other then network related changes which the user can also do. setting SSID, WiFi channel, auth type, password, IP address, subnet mask and if the SSID is hidden.

Here is a list of what I have right now for configuration changes in the test firmware.

IP address
SSID
WiFi password
WiFi authentication type/mode
Subnet mask
WiFi channel
SSID visibility

turn signal delay - this is the delay between frames of the turn signal animation
turn signal decay - this is the speed that it takes for trailing pixels to decay/turn off
turn signal number of bright pixels - the number of fully lit pixels for the turn signal
parking light delay - delay between frames for parking light animations
turn signal color
parking light color

There are 2 sets of the above settings one for the front turn signal and another for the marker light

The last setting is the color of the DRL's

I will be adding different animations for turning on and off the parking lights and the drls. There will also be different animation choices for the turn signals.

The firmware is also able to be updated through that config web page.

Once I have everything powered up and the basic firmware running bug free I will add in the movement of the projectors afterwards. I have a 13.8 volt 40 amp bench top power supply so I don't have to install it into the car to run tests and bug test everything.

You can see in the last photo the wiring harness for that headlamp lens. I am going to be using the factory clips for the high/low beam, turn signals and parking lamps. I am going to have to tap into the HSCAN high, HSCAN low and ignition wires which are in the wiring harness that crosses the front of the car behind the bumper. I will be running a power wire to the under hood fuse box and I will add a fuse into the box if I am able to. all of the wiring will be put into the stock wiring harnesses. I have a 22 pin weatherpack water resistant inline clip so I can unplug the housing if I need to remove it from the vehicle. The HID ballasts are going to mount on the bumper cover support that the fender liner attaches to just under the headlights. The marker light has a 3 pin water tight connector and that connector is epoxy bonded into the back of the marker light where the old bulb went in. Inside of the marker light are the 21 pixels attached to a custom made PCB.


Here is an image of the back side of the power distribution/voltage divider board



 
here are a couple of videos of one of the marker lights as I was working on it.

[youtube]PsRjVL1mq7o[/youtube]

[youtube]ob_KyG1Ww8Y[/youtube]


**EDIT
Here are the links to the videos if you are not able to see them. For some reason they were there and then disappeared.

https://youtu.be/PsRjVL1mq7o
https://youtu.be/ob_KyG1Ww8Y

[kgschlosser]

I have to do some work still on the inside of the headlamp lens. The drl/parking light/turn signal LED's are located at the front most edge of the housing so they are not going to be directly visible when looking at the headlight from the front of the car. My plan is to make a shield that will push the light from the LED's into the lenses at the bottom. the outside of the lens below the bend at the bottom will be painted black and on the inside above the shield and below the  bend is also going to be painted black. This will keep the majority of the light in the lens. at the end of those ridges I am going to use a piece of 220 grit paper right on the edge and sand a line across the tops of the ridges. the 220 grit paper is going to create a surface that the light is able to escape the lens from. It will light up that line from one end to the other. The line is going to be 3mm's thick or so.

This is what a 6mm wide strip looks like lit up and I am using 1/2 the number of LEDs that are in the headlamp. I am also not able to light the LED's up 100% because they get to hot without a heat sink. This is 80% output. The LED strip in the headlamps do have heat sinks and those heat sinks are on the outside of the housing. I used aluminum screws to screw the heat sinks to an aluminum strip that the LED's are sitting on top of. I have one screw for every 2 pixels so about 20 screws that transfer the heat to the heat sinks. I put buty rubber on the bottoms of the heat sinks before I screwed them down making it water/air tight


[youtube]XyCorIFrVjk[/youtube]

***EDIT
Not sure why the video is not coming up this time. Here is a link if you cannot view the video.

https://youtu.be/XyCorIFrVjk

[kgschlosser]

Here is that light test in the videos above as an image in the dark. Now remember this is 80% output with 1/2 the number of LEDs  that housing has.

[Sly Bob]

Looks really sharp kgschlosser, looking forward to seeing the final result.

[JoshMcMadMac]

This is insane, love it!

[kgschlosser]

There is only one other DIY active headlamp that I know of and the original housings and location were not used. The guy who built it put them up at the top of the windshield on the inside of the car. They are only curve active as well.

I wanted to keep the lamps in the stock location, have horizon active and also add a bucket load more light.


the stock headlamps are 1200 lumen on high beam and 700 lumen on low beam per lamp

my headlights are going to be 3200 for low beam and 11,000 for high beam per lamp.
The stock fog lights are around 1000 lumen per lamp and the ones I have are 4000 lumen per lamp.

I will be able to have both my fog lights and my high beams on at the same time if I want to. my fog light switch is going to be set up so if I triple tap it they will stay on when I turn  the high beams on.

so total light output from the front of my car when can be 30,000 lumen compared to the stock 2400 lumen.

There is also another 1400 lumen I can get out of the LED's per side if I wanted to bump it up even more.


The last image I posted is a test for an idea I have for the tail lamps. I am going to be making a 3D lens for the brake lights/turn signals. I am also going to have a MEMS sensor attached to those so the brake lights can light progressively. They will light up in stages and depending on how hard the brakes are applied is going to control how fast the brake lamps light up. to full output. So If I just lightly step on the brakes when I am moving say 60 mph it will take about 10 seconds for the lamps to fully light up. if I slam on the brakes they will ramp up to 100% in a few milliseconds.

Here is a 3D rendering I did of the tail lamp lens assembly.





This last one is as it would be seen from the back of the car. each ring will visible and will light separately starting from the largest ring. This is also how the turn signals will light up as well.



The cool thing is because of how deep the tail lights are on the Solstice as your point of view moves from the rear of the car up the side of it how the rings are seen is going to change. They will start to pull apart from each other adding a 3D  effect to it. The edges where the light is emitted from is at a 50 degree angle so there will be light seen from every angle the lamps are viewed at.




 

[kgschlosser]

the very center can either be blacked out left to light up solid or laser engraved with an image

[kgschlosser]

here is another video of the tail lamp test

[youtube]u9SFzwW3fkQ[/youtube]


https://youtu.be/u9SFzwW3fkQ

[Critterman]

Well I can see the videos but not the pictures.

[Sol Asylum]

I can't see the videos but I think they are normally blocked when I view the forum at work.

Are you running all the projectors off of 1 relay?  How hot do the projectors get?

[kgschlosser]

I am running the HID's off of 2 relays. this is because an HID ballast can draw as much as 15amps when they first turn on. The current draw will settle down to between 6 and 8 amp after a few seconds of them being on. I couldn't find a 30 amp relay that I could trip using 3.3 volts and 60 milliamps. I could locate 15 amp amp relays to do the job. I could have used a solid state relay instead of a mechanical one they are expensive and I wanted to keep the cost down. They also get hot an i didn't want to add more heat into the inside of the housing.

The HID bulbs do get hot. The power supplies will shutdown before the housing or lens would melt so I am not too concerned with that aspect. If I run into the power supplies turning off then I will add a 40mm suspended oil bearing fan made by Noctua to get some airflow through headlamp assembly. This will be tricky because I don't want any moisture getting to the inside of the headlamp so I may have to use a small heat exchanger. I might be able to get away with putting a heat sink on the outside of the housing and one on the inside and attaching the 2 together through the housing using aluminum screws. Cold absorbs heat so that might be enough to suck the heat out of the housing provided there is enough of a delta-t difference between the inside heat sink and the outside one.

I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping I don't have a thermal problem.

[kgschlosser]

when I get this thing fired up to run my initial tests on it I will check the temperature of the projectors before I put the lens over everything. I have already upgraded the heat sinks on the power supplies and put larger ones that have more fins so I don't think there is too much more I can do for them. The power supplied are rated to 5 amps and I put a 4 amp load on one of them as a test and the output voltage didn't even waver one bit. I am really happy with that result as I am not going to be placing that much load on either of them. I have a single 100amp 5volt power supply that I bought to power all of the things I am adding to the car and I decided not to use it and keep everything self contained in the event I decided to build these things for people.

[TomatoSoup]

For the side markers, you should program them to light up form the bottom with a random flame effect.  It would look really cool to drive down the street with flames from the front of your car.  You could then sell a set to @Rob the elder to go along with his painted flames

[kgschlosser]

@TomatoSoup

LMAO.

It can be done. To make it look like flames the lenses would have to be painted so a flame pattern would allow the light through. I could definitely make he LED's change colors to make it look like he flames are moving.

[kgschlosser]

I put together a test setup with the processor and get some wiring so I can run tests on the basic functionality of the code. I am cleaning up some of the code and optimizing the code to make it run faster and use less memory.

I have to change the startup sequence so basic functions like lights and turn signals will become available as quick as possible and any network related stuff will load after those things become available.

[Sly Bob]

I wish I had the talent to do this. Kudos to you sir, well done!

[Critterman]

I just read his post in AWE and then try to figure out what he is saying. 

[kgschlosser]

@Critterman

what are you trying to figure out? I can eliminate some of the "geek speak" if that would help ya at all.

[Critterman]

LOL,  electrical work especially electronics is above my paygrade.  I have a general understanding of what you are doing and in awe of you being able to do it.   Best of luck and would love to see the finished project.

[kgschlosser]

as an update to the project..

Bench test of the basic software is working and I have the bugs ironed out. I have to test the voltage dividers and change a couple things around with the wiring and dial the power supplies in.

I still have to fabricate the reflector for the LEDs in the headlamp housings and paint a small portion of the housing near the LEDs black. I did have to cut a notch out of the bumper cover support so I need to make a trip to the store to get a piece if 1" x 1" x 1/8" aluminum "L" channel to rivet to the support about 1" lower then the notch I had to make. I had to make the notch because the 2 servos that come out of the bottom of the housing were hitting the top of the support. I want to add the strength back into the support. I also have to unpin the factory harness to remove the old wiring for the turn signal bulb and the marker light bulb. I am going to crimp new pins for those wires that to to the new headlamp assembly.

I also have to pull the under good fuse box out and see what kind of an animal it is going to be to add 2 30 amp fuses, one for each headlamp assembly. I would prefer to have the fuses in the fuse box instead of attaching additional wiring to the battery ad using inline fuses. I believe that there are additional spaces that can be used but the holes for the prongs on the fuses aren't in the box. Nothing that cannot be solved with a drill bit and an end mill for a Dremil tool. use a mini female spade and  epoxy it in place from the underside have a wire come off of it with a terminal ring attach at the other end of the wire and use a steel pop rivet to attach the terminal ring to one of the bus bars. I believe there are open positions in the clips that plug into the box so I will pin a new connection into the stock clips and bundle the additional wires into the factory wiring harness. CAN high, CAN low and ignition I can splice into right at the harness that runs right behind the front bumper.


total connections I have to make
Plug in clip for high and low beam into the stock bulb clip
new pins in the stock clip for parking lights and turn signals
Tap can high and can low
Tap ignition
run power to fuse box
and ground at the ground point next to the hood hinges.

Make a nice looking mount for the HID ballasts and igniters and mount them to the front of the bumper cover support
mount the 22 pin inline water resistant clip. There should be enough room on the bumper cover support to do this I will ass a piece of 1/8" thick aluminum where I am going to drill the hole to mount the clip. The clip is like 1.75" diameter so it's a pretty large hole and I don't want to reduce the strength of the bumper cover support. I am thinking that a aluminum flat bar that is 3" wide and 5" long will do the trick!