How to: Add Foot well Courtesy lights!

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Infinite-T
Posts: 136
Joined: Sat Feb 27, 2010 10:42 am
Car: 08 Altima Coupe 2.5S
Location: Seattle WA

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Ok, so I wanted a cool, but cheap and easy mod to do to my ride. I thought it might be a nice touch to add foot well lights. Many people here have them, but have them on a switch, so you would have to manually turn them on and off. Thats fine, but I wanted them to light ones feet only when getting in, our out of the car, just like the dome light lights the cabin.

What I did was got some 1 foot blue LED strip lights, like the ones on Oznium. I mounted the strips to the bottom lip of the plastic dash panels so they face downward. At the very ends of the strips, I drilled a small
1/8th inch hole to poke the light wires thru to the backside of the panel for a really clean, wire free look. (even though you can't see the fixture unless you get your head down there and look up). The wires from the passenger side light pass behind the center console to the drivers side and splice with the + and - of the drivers side light.

Then, open the "A-pillar". Pop the cover off carefully with a flat blade screw driver. Under the piller is 2 runs of wire. One is in a white plastic conduit, or tube. THIS IS THE AIRBAG WIRES, DONT MESS WITH THEM!! The other set is covered with black cloth tape. Undo a section of that tape about 3 inches long. Isolate 2 wires. One is white with a continuous red stripe, the other is white with two silver bands. The red/white is the positive lead. The white/silver is the negative lead. Those little blue splice taps (you can get at like Auto Zone) work great. Follow the instructions on the package to make the splice. Splice in the pos. and neg leads and snap the plastic covers over the splice point. You can use small zip ties to tie the new wires to the old ones as you run them back down the pillar. Use a credit card to push the wires into the crack on the side of the dash and down to the footwell area. Use butt splices to connect your light leads to the power leads. DO NOT JUST SIMPLY GROUND THE NEGATIVE LEAD FROM YOUR LIGHTS TO THE CHASSIS. THEY WONT TURN OFF IF YOU DO THAT. THEY MUST BE CONNECTED TO THE WHITE/SILVER LEAD.
Snap the pillar cover back on and use zip ties and zip tie cradles to hold the wires up behind all the panels and stuff out of sight and out of the way of feet.

Sit back and admire your work! If you did a good job you cannot see the lights or wires at all. You will have a nice ambient glow to light your feet when you enter and exit your car. They will go on/off just as your dome light does.

The following picture is some what of a wire diagram and does not depict the exact location of the wires, or routing. The green ovals are the lights. The red lines are the Positive leads from the lights. The black lines are the negative leads of the lights. The colored lines on the pillar depict the existing pos. and neg. leads to the courtesy light circuit. There may be other ways to do this, but this is how I did it and it turned out working and looking PERFECT!

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Last edited by Infinite-T on Thu Jul 15, 2010 7:31 am, edited 1 time in total.


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CoupeVQ35CVT
Posts: 617
Joined: Thu Jul 02, 2009 9:50 am
Car: '98 Lexus GS400, '91 'Yota Land Cruiser
'09 Altima Coupe 3.5SE CVT, '06 Sentra 1.8 SE

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Very cool write up, and picture. I might have to take a look at the car's wiring like you show and see if I can't do this myself too. I actually have a couple of white 12" LED strips I could use perfectly for this (since the Audi style headlight LED mod is looking to be way more complicated!).

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dangeris
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Joined: Wed Sep 19, 2007 6:18 pm
Car: 08 Code Red 3.5
08 BMW 328xi Coupe
90 300ZX 2+0 NA
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Nice write up :bigthumb: You sir have just earned your self a custom title. Lemme know what you want it to be and I will make it so! :chuckle:

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Infinite-T
Posts: 136
Joined: Sat Feb 27, 2010 10:42 am
Car: 08 Altima Coupe 2.5S
Location: Seattle WA

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dangeris wrote:Nice write up :bigthumb: You sir have just earned your self a custom title. Lemme know what you want it to be and I will make it so! :chuckle:
Awesome, thanks, Ill have to think of one :gapteeth:

ndn411
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 19, 2011 8:50 am

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Hey, sorry for bringing this back from the dead but I'm new to this forum. I had some questions though... My wires look nothing like yours, so where do I connect mine to?

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As you can see, my car's wires are reddish pink/black and my led wires are clear/red... Do I just do the red to red and the clear to black?

Thanks in advance!

ndn411
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 19, 2011 8:50 am

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I currently tried the red to red and black to clear and the led strip does not turn off with the dome. The pinkish wire I have is for something else besides the dome led. Even with that disconnected, the interior lights work.

Blackmobile
Posts: 1293
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2008 11:01 am
Car: 2008 Altima Coupe 2.5S Super Black

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this should be what you're looking for in the A-pillar:
Image

there should be 4 white wires with green stripes, you want to tap into the centre 2 wires.

ndn411
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 19, 2011 8:50 am

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Blackmobile wrote:this should be what you're looking for in the A-pillar:
Image

there should be 4 white wires with green stripes, you want to tap into the centre 2 wires.
A few hours after I posted this, I opened up the Dome cluster and realized that it was the 4 wire strip and not the other 2 that I originally had it on. Me and my friend sat there figuring out one by one which wire we needed to connect the wires to. Basically, it ended up being what you said. Thanks anyway for the help!

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czonin
Posts: 434
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 11:30 am
Car: White 09 Altima Coupe 2.5S
Location: Huntington, NY
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Nice write-up! :bigthumb: Hopefully gonna do this sometime soon.


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