Cycle Analyst Backlight Switch

[adrian_sm]

My plan is to add a DPST switch that turns off/on the DC-DC converter for my lights and CA backlight at the same time. Luckily both of these require me shorting a couple of pins to turn things off.

From http://www.ebikes.ca/drainbrain.shtml

How do I turn off the backlight?

The backlight can be turned off by shorting the two pins leading to the backlighting LED.

It would be possible to insert a switch across these leads so that you could have ON/OFF control of the light if desired.

Has anyone done this. I just cracked up my CA and can't quite work out which pins I should be shorting. I really don't want to just poke around shorting random pins and see what happens.

 

[adrian_sm]

Okay I am an idiot. Realised as soon as I posted that I should just power the thing up an have a look.

Then it was pretty obvious.

 

[adrian_sm]

Just in case anyone stubbles across this thread, and wants to do this. It worked a treat.

I cut a hole in the front of my CA to mounted the switch, hooked one set of the switch poles across the LED pins of the CA backlight LED, the other set of poles to the ON/OFF switch points for my DC-DC converter, and hey presto it worked.

Now the one switch:
- turns on the CA backlight
- turns on my two Cree R2 headlights
- turns on my 7 red LED tail light.

Much better than my previous method of leaving the CA on all the time, and having to manually connect the DC-DC converter to my spare charge points on the battery when I needed lights.

If I get really excited I could even hook up my blue LED strip again... :lol:

 

[rkosiorek]

novel idea. the LED backlight is in series with a series dropping resistor on the board. my normal inclination would hace been to cut a trace somewhere and bridge it with the switch. cutting, splicing, little traces being burned off the board, potential for doing some serious damage.

this method is so much simpler and neater. just short out the light. it's not like shorting out everything because the series resistor is still in circuit. 2 nice big pads to solder to. neat simple. left to my own devices i would never have thought of something so simple.

rick