Making a Modified "Chasing" Car Tail Light Circuit

The post illustrates an elaborate circuit design that can be used as an enhanced "chasing" LED tail light for cars and other vehicles, the design also includes the modification details for the associated turn signal and the park light systems. The idea was designed and presented by Mr. Jason.


The entire discussion may be referred to in the comment section of this post:

Sequential Turn Signal Indicator

The circuit description below explains the proposed modified car chasing light circuit, as presented by Mr. Jason:

Okay, I had a chance to work on it, but have not tested it on the breadboard yet. If this works, one 4017 and 555 timer chip can be used for both left and right turn signal.

Here's the schematic



If you need a larger file for better viewing, just let me know and I can email it to you.

I hope you can understand what it is doing. The LED's I will be using have 3 wires out. One is ground, one is Brake/Turn, and one is Park. When just 12 volts is hooked up to the assemblies, It seems that there are different resistors to control the brightness (a fixed amount) for the brake/turn, and for the Park. Which is a nice factory option from the LED assemblies themselves. If I just use one wire (the brake/turn), and a potentiometer to adjust the brightness for the Park, I am thinking I would need a 19W potentiometer, and those are expensive. Each LED assembly draws 246mA at 12.8 volts. If all 6 lights were on, that's 246mA * 12.8 volts = 18.89W of power. So, wiring them separately and using a common ground to switch them on and off, would eliminate the need for a potentiometer, since the resistors are built into the lights themselves.

I am using a NOR gate to turn off the Park LED's when the brake or turn signals are applied.

I am not sure on the resistor values. I've changed the Vcc for the 4017 and 555 to run off of the LM7805 voltage regulator. By doing that, I have also run the other inputs/outputs of those chips off of the LM7805 as well? I am not sure of the Capacitor and Resistor values needed then.



I'd like to switch all power to 5volts for less power consumption. Except for the LED supply voltage of course. that needs to stay the 12-14 volts coming straight from the wiring of the Truck.

I took your suggestion and added the transistor and the resistor to rapid discharge the 470uF capacitors so the LED's do not continue to sequence for 15 seconds AFTER the turn signals have been turned off. As per your request, I have connected them to the last sequencing output of the 4017. It makes sense, and as you said, should work for turning off the LED's from sequencing.

If I can get this to work, I plan on building a circuit to allow up to the 8 sequencing LED's (available outputs for the 4017 since two are used to reset the 4017 and the SCR's). I will do it using either dip switches or more simply, solder bridges. I will also make it so that solder bridges will be before and after a resistor of each LED, if a resistor is needed for standard LED's to be wired up. I need to do this for my car, and my new lights will have 5 rows of LED's I will need to sequence instead of the 3 that my nephews truck has. So I'll need to design the circuit to work for both. Fun Stuff!

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