Hey all. I have a car with courtesy lighting circuit that is always hot. When the doors are opened it grounds the system and the lights come on. I spliced into the car an electronic rear view mirror with a separate line to hook the maplights into the courtesy lighting circuit.
Problem is, I need some sort of circuit to splice into the open ground line of the courtesy circuit that will throw 12V+ on the map light circuit when the door switch closes (grounds) the circuit.
It would be nice to incorporate a timer to keep the lighting on for a period of time after the ground is lost but that might be muddying the waters a little much.
Persumably I could simply put a relay with the coil inline in the open ground courtesy circuit to throw a separate line from the fuse box to the map lights but that almost seems a little....shoddy.
The filament courtesy lights have been replaced with 34" LED strips behind the seats and in the footwells. I'm not that certain what the voltage drop of an inline relay would mean for them.
So I need either a schematic to sense the voltage drop as the hot courtesy circuit is grounded and port 12V+ to the maplight line, or a more elaborate schematic to maintain the ground (timer) and also maintain the 12v to the maplights for a period of time, say 10 seconds or so after the ground is interrupted.
I suppose I could do 2 separate systems but 1 would be more elegant.
Anyone like to take a stab at it?
Thanks, Kurt ~~~~~~ Bait for spammers: root@localhost postmaster@localhost admin@localhost abuse@localhost postmaster@[127.0.0.1] snipped-for-privacy@ftc.gov ~~~~~~ Remove "spamless" to email me.