Need electronics help!
 

So, I'm trying to wire up my high beam solenoids and I'm running into several issues. I need to design a new wiring harness from scratch that will make myheadlight circuits work completely different than they currently do. I've done 3 different simple relay circuits on my cars, but this is more complicated and I could use an assist from someone who actually knows a little bit about circuit design. I'm heading back home to peruse some stuff I've downloaded here and get started on figuring it out, so if any of you are willing to help me out, call my cell at 707-430-3430. I have no internet access at home until wednesday.

Might be able to help, but won't be back up until later this afternoon...

I think I solved it last night burning the midnight oil. I'll fire up the MSP skillz later and post my schematic.

Okay, here's what I came up with.

http://www.seccs.org/forums/attachme...1&d=1172097019


I need one powered circuit that runs just the ballasts for the projectors, and another circuit that runs the ballasts as well as activateing the solenoids that move the shields in the projectors, and both circuits have to be able to be powered simultaneously without conflicts.

Also, I'm not sure if parallel or series is better for the solenoids.

Okay, it took all of like 3 seconds after posting to see mistakes I didn't see before. The switched ground system from the existing headlight harness isn't represented very well, but basically it's just a hot lead direct from the fusebox and a switch on the ground side for High and Low beams. I can post the .pdf of the headlight circuit tonight if anybody needs it.

I didn't pay super close attention to the diagram, but from what I see, I'd be worried about a failure of one of the solenoids taking out both lights. Headlights are a safety device, so you need redundancy... if any one part fails you want to make sure it only kills one light so you're not stranded w/o lighting.

You mean a relay failure? If one of the high beam solenoids went out, it looks like the low beam circuit would still operate, but if the main relay went out, then yeah, no more headlights. I'll be sure to carry a spare. And I will see if I can isolate the wo sides to the two individual headlight fuses instead of only using one for the relay and a seperate new fuse for the ballast power supply.

I think I've got something for you, but I need some info... I can't remember if the LOW stays grounded when the HI switch is turned on. Do you know? I'm thinking it doesn't... if that LOW/COMMON/HI connector is the 9007 bulb connector...

Also, one more question: does the shield solenoid draw much current? Seems to me that could run directly off the Hi-beam wiring w/o an issue, it seems silly to use a relay (which is itself a solenoid) to switch another solenoid.

With the rotating switch fully on and the stalk in middle position, only Low is grounded. Push it forward for Highs and only Highs are gorunded. Pull it back and it grounds both.

Also, GC/GM/GF used H4 (that's also called 9008 right?) bulbs for headlights. But I don't really need to have a diagram for that, I can figure it out with a meter. I just need to know the states of all three wires in all 3 switch positions, and I should have that right based on everything I've read. So while I may not have drawn the 3 prongs of the bulb in the correct positions, it's just for reference anyway.

The solenoids are part of the high beam activation circuit. The relay they run through is the other switch for ground to activate the ballast relay. I doubt they take much current. The only difference at all between the high beam circuit and low beam circuit, at least as I intend it, is that the high beam circuit runs through the solenoids for the shields. The complication when I was trying to figure this out was keeping from having one of the hots activating the other circuit, if that makes any sense. If you reverse the positioning of the two activation relays you migth be able to see what I mean.

Alright... how's this look.

Everything is totally redundant and operates entirely at the headlight, with only 1 more relay than your original drawing. The only wire you'll need to run is a power line from the battery to each light, everything else can live right at the light itself (though I would recommend some high quality weather resistant relays).

As far as the way it works:

When the LOW is switched to ground, the ballasts get fused power from the battery. When the HI is switched to ground, the shield solenoids are activated, as well as the right hand relays, which in turn grounds the relays that are powering the ballasts.

If I remember correctly, when switching from low to hi, there is an intermittent state where both low and hi are grounded, so you shouldn't have any weird issues with cutting power to the ballasts. Nor should you have problems with hitting the high beam passing lights with the lows off (though I'm not sure that flash to pass with HIDs works at all since the ballast takes time to warm up...)

I'm pretty sure HIDs should stay on all the time. It's not good for them to come on and off with the high beams.

Yeah, I am trying to find some male H4 connectors locally, and I'll bundle them up after the harness is built, definitely. As for relays, I'm using leftover Hella relays. Any easy ways to weather proof those without making it a pain to take them apart later?

Exactly what I was going for, gracias.

It does momentarily turn off all grounds as you pull the switch from high to low or from low to FTP, but that's okay. I don't really even need it to be functional. The problem I was worried about was blowing a ballast at worst or a fuse at best if I were to accidentally hit FTP because I didn't have the hot circuits isolated well enough.

HIDs will light off instantly with a switch, but they have to warm up to be at the proper color. It takes mine about 2-5 secodns depending on weather.

Mine are Hella Gen 3 OEM-quality ballasts. I am not worried about flicking the switch on them occasionally. I'd have burned one out by now if they were that sensitive, 10 times over. :p I was worried about a voltage spike killing one if I built the harness wrong.

Is that in reference to my diagram? The way I have it laid out, the ballasts will maintain power the whole time the lights are switched on... they won't be turned off at all when you go from low to hi beams.

Now on to my real problem- who wants to teach me how to make MS Paint docs that don't look like I drew them on the skreen wif krayon? :lol:

They might momentarily flicker when I switch between high or low, but that's okay.

Kevin, when I did a similar wiring harness for my EDM projectors, I ended up wrapping my relays in plastic bags and tape. It didn't really help all that much... I still had relays fail on me. Hell, I remember after one meet walking out to my car to find one headlight switch on because during dinner a relay failed open. :lol: Over the 4 years or so I've had my lights, I think I had 3 relay failures, all due to corrosion. So do what you can to seal 'em up, and use dielectric grease on all the connectors.

As far as the ballasts switching on and off... When I was testing my switch, I would turn the low beams on, then very slowly push the lever forward to turn on the hi beams. At the switch over point, *both* low and hi were grounded. If your car is the same as mine, you shouldn't have a problem w/ going from low to high. However, I'm not sure what happens when you FTP, or go low to FTP... the circuit could be interrupted, I never tested that.

Yeah, I think relays occasionally fail simly because they are relays. :lol: I'll make sure to use dielectric grease, and I used waterproof tape to seal all of my temporary connectors on my original harness... which has like 3 times as many spade connectors as it needs because of reconfigs. :lol:As for switching, I might be able to get a momentary double-ground between highs only and lows only, but I am almost positive that the FTP has seperate grounds so that it works when the rotary switch is in any position.

I can help.

http://www.hooptywagon.com/img/sybirgrafiks.gif

So the harnesses are built. Hopefully I will have time to install and test them before the meet.

I took the redundancy a stepfurther and completely seperated the two sides by adding a second fused power to the ballasts.

Now on to trying to figure out where to mount the Supertones. Anybody interested in a FIAMM Freeway Blaster when I get them installed?

Why are you dumping the Blaster in favor of the Supertones? I thought the blaster was a decent horn. Let me guess, they were in the box of parts with the clutch and other goodies you got a deal on back in your RS days. :)

I might be interested in the blaster. Low or High, or both? I have twin air horns with a mini air pump from an old Lancia I was going to wire up to replace the anemic STI horns.

The Supertones are leftover from both RSuses. I may or may not have a FB, but it does say FIAMM on it. It's spiral cone shaped and a little smaller than one supertone. It's pretty decent but I don't think it's quite as loud as the Supertones, and it definitely doesn't have the resonance.

Khail, I've been havign a hard time finding the male H4 connectors I need to make ths plug-and-play. Do you have them in stock, before I order them from susqehanna?

We don't carry the male connectors, just female ones.

Thanks dude.

Alrighty, so the harness are all fabbed, plugged in, and everything works super. Pleasantly surprised to see that either there's no momentary loss of ground when switching between beams, or the ballasts hold a charge longer than that interval. No dipping between highs and lows.

Almost.

There's a minor issue with the current harness that causes a pretty undesirable side effect... :lol: Fortunately it operates perfectly safely and I can use it until I install the fix as posted below. I need to do a resistance check tomorrow to see if I am going to need a resistor to make it work, but it did turn out simpler than I ever thought it would need to be.

I could have sworn that your latest drawing was one that I had started with, but I found a problem where the hi beams would latch on, so even after you turned them off, they'd stay on... But looking at your drawing, I don't see anything wrong with it... I guess I had something a little different.

And it doesn't look like you'd need a resistor in there anywhere... it looks right as-is.

What's the side-effect you're having with the current harness? I had some weird ass issues with my fog lights causing my hi-beams to latch on due to the way the fog light switches indicator lamp interacting with a line I had tapped to use as an input for the DRL switch I made.

I think the first drawing did would work fine, but it doesn't isolate teh left and rights sides. Any single component failure could disable my lights entirely, so wehn you posted yours I tossed that one and built the one you drew.

Unfortunately, you guessed it... the high beams lock themselves on. I have to kill the lights to get them back to lowbeam only.

The new schematic should work fine, but I was thinking that if resistance of the high beam shield solenoid is high enough, they may not ground out when I hit flash-to-pass. Other than that they should be perfect.

Thanks for your help dude. I probably would have eventually figured this out (hopefully without killing a ballast) but you definitely sped up the process for me.

There must be a ground path through the dash lights or something that locks that solenoid on. You'll probably have the same problem with your drawing as well... as they look functionally the same.

You migth still be right, but I think your harness has a ground loop, as shown in attachment. Once you power the high beam relay, it grounds itself through the power side back to the low beam.

This would fix it too, but if I can eliminate a relay on each side, I might as well.

Edit: Maybe not. This one has an issue of two hots going to a single ground in FTP, so there are probably gremlins lurking in it as well.

I see what you're saying.... because the low and hi are both pulled to ground as the hi's are turned off, the hi solenoid latches on through the low solenoid... what's confusing me is how that can happen with the +V on the wires between the two solenoids.

I guess that's why I'm a software engineer, and not an electrical engineer.

From what I understand, you can split apart a hot lead as much as you want, it's when you try to run multiple hots to a single ground you can have issues. If you look at your original schematic, you can see how it has 4 hot leads from a single source, but they all go to various grounds without teeing. It operates fine as a circuit, it just has an unintended effect when the high beam is grounded.

Multiple hots to a single ground should be fine... after all, everything eventually grounds back to the neg terminal on the battery, right?

I think you're thinking of signals... like trying to splice speaker wires... you can splice the signal into multiple signals just fine, but if you try to join two different signals, you can get a mess.

I see.

So it's finally, really, totally finished. I have constant low beams and high beams when I activate them.

But, the simplified harness I drew today didn't work. The high beam circuit didn't have enough power to activate the solenoids. constant low beams, but no high beam activation. I guess that the ground signal just wouldn't overcome the resistance of the solenoids when the low beam ground was handy with basically no resistance.

So I started investigating. High and low filaments of H4 bulbs have about 3-4 Ohms resistance. the relays I am using have about 65 Ohms. :eek: I couldn't measure the resistance of thesolenoids however... since they only close when they have power going through them. I guess I could have measured voltage drop and calculated the resistance if I felt scientific, but I am strictly in engineering mode on this so I didn't care. (Scientists try to understand everything about their experiment; engineers jsut want to make things work.)

So, I decided I would just go back to using a second pair of relays to isolate the solenoid circuit with another lead off of the battery. I am using single fused leads for the ballasts, but I figured on shared fuse for the solenoids is fine, since I don't need one if I lose the other anyway.

My first attempt was pretty awesome. It didn't have any captured grounds... it just worked backwards. :lol: Low beams ran the highs and high beams only ran lows. Never did figure out why. So, back to the drawing board... and I finally had the epiphany I had been searching for.

I don't need to use the low beam ground at all. The whole point of the low ground is so you can have it switched off when you use high beams... which I don't want. So I moved the ballast circuit ground from the switched low beam ground to a constant ground. Since the hot feed only works when you move the rotary switch on, the extra ground is redundant. That greatly simplified everything, because now I just had to make the other circuit close the solenoids when the high beam ground was switched on.

Man this was a pain in the ass, but in the end it's worth it I guess.

http://www.seccs.org/forums/attachme...8&d=1172384184

Can't you can take that hi-beam relay out? Split the hot, run one to power the ballast via a relay as you have already, then let the hi-ground pull the shield solenoid to ground by itself? No need to run BATT to the shield solenoid, since it's just a solenoid w/ low current, right? An no latching issues because there's no ground loop?

That's what I initially tried to do, but the current from the Common hot on the H4 plug isn't enough to close the solenoids. If I ran battery power directly to the solenoid and then in to the high ground, it might work... but it works now and I don't have an immediate need for those relays, so I'm not going to bother messing with it. :lol:

Josh, how long were you trolling the internet looking for a place to post that picture? :lol:

I please the Fifth ;)

It's funny, if you look at Kevin's last diagram, the relay on the right looks like a Mooninite (from ATHF) giving you the finger.

Did you see that? I was drawing it as hard as I could.