Been working on wiring up the front of the bike since mounting the headlights. Because a lot depended on getting those lights put in place, I've been able to finish up a lot of the "little" stuff I've been putting off . . . seems to be a common theme here. As usual, the little stuff always takes longer than you think. The first hurdle was trying to remember how I designed the circuit board so I could put the pins in the right connector positions. I thought I'd messed the accent / turn signal wiring up like a hundred times because I kept interpreting the PCB different ways but fortunately I got it right. Good thing too because I literally have one crimp pin left, didn't leave much room for error.
Once everything was wired I temporarily put power to it all and was happy to see everything worked as designed. A note about the low beam: since I'm using an off road ultra high power light for my low beam, I'm using a power resistor in series with it to dim it when operating as my normal low beam. That required a dedicated relay on the PCB to switch the resistor in and out of the circuit based on the position of the high beam switch. Baja Designs actually offers a low power harness for my particular light which is literally just a resistor in series. I bought the same resistor from Digikey and mounted it to the aluminum headlight plate which serves as a monster heat sink to help dissipate a lot of the heat generated when in operation. When testing off-bike, it was getting pretty toasty but now it's just barely warm to the touch when operating.
Accent lights working:
Wiring of the accent and turn signal LED strips. (Four cables with zip ties in the top right). You can see the low beam relay as well, bottom left.
I was particularly proud of how the resistor was mounted. I had to grind down some M3 hex button screws to clear the resistor body and drilled/tapped the plate to accept them. Makes a great thermal connection to the plate so I'm not worried about overheating anything. Don't mind the previous attempt above with the large hole and snapped off screw . . .
Location of the resistor. It's all wired in now and fully functional. In the image above showing the wiring of the accent / turn signals, you can see two open holes in the PCB, that's where the resistor wires in.
I shot a video of the light functioning but because it's less than a minute, YouTube turned it into a Short which means I can't post it sooooo thanks YouTube. Once I finish all the wiring I'll post a video of everything functioning.
