aCUREa

I installed 194/168 bulb sockets to each front footwell that turn on when I open the doors (driver and passenger side separate). The driver socket gets power with only the driver door, and vice versa. There's no fading or dimming like the usual greed/red wire people tap for courtesy lighting. I taped the individual door wire itself. These footwell lights act just like the interior door-corner lights rather than the dome lights.

Since I used bulb sockets, I can plug in any 194/168 wedge bulb I want. In case you don't know, 194/168 is the size used in our car for parklights, tail lights, tag lights, and door courtesy lights.

All of the bulbs on this below link will work in my new sockets.
http://autolumination.com/194.htm

I only wired the driver side socket so far. The passenger side is still waiting until I feel like getting back out there. Its mounted and wired up to the relay already, but its just not grounded to the passenger door-open wire yet.

I put the driver socket here.


Then I tried out 4 different 194/168 LED bulbs I have laying around and took some pics. This was the fun part... trying all my bulbs out.

1) WLED-WHP from SBL- the ones many of us here use for whiter tag lights. I have these in storage for just that... tag lights. So I tried one real quick.


(a quick test to make sure the bulb works)


then I plugged it in



2) 921-CW12 from SBL (cool white). I have these ones in storage for my stock door-corner lights.





3) 921-B9 from SBL or autolum (blue). I don't use these for anything. I just have a few laying around.





4) 921-UV9 from SBL (purple)


^^its impossible to take a shot of purple... it just looks blue bc the camera cannot handle the spectrum, but its really deep purple when looking in person... looks great. In fact I like the purple the best with my black interior. I'm keeping the purple bulb in for good.

Now the wiring:

The problem I had is that I had already installed footwell lights months ago that turn on when I start the car, so I didn't want these new ones overlapping with the old ones when I open the door (subtlety is the key). Therefore, I wired it so the sockets only get + when the ignition is OFF. I did this by taking advantage of the relay I installed for the DRL mod I did. It provides power to the DRL when the ignition is ON, but when the ignition's OFF, the relay powers the footwell light sockets now instead. It just switches back and forth from DRL/footwell lights as I turn the ignition on/off. In English, this simply means the door activates the footwell lights as long as the car is off- once the ignition is turned on, the sockets are disabled completely until the car is turned off again.


For the ignition-OFF function, I did have to run a wire through the firewall because my DRL relay is in the engine bay. So here's how I did it the second time: since I already had wires going through, I pulled some of the old wire's slack back into the cabin, I e-taped the new wire terminal to the old wire, then I pulled the old wire back through from the other side, and it pulled the new wire with it. Then the rest was just some 'gymnastics' to reach and grab it... CAKE it took me less than 10 minutes with the firewall. Lastly, I used a 1/2A fuse for this (good protection).

Then I grounded the driver socket to the driver door-open wire. You can access it on the fusebox, but since I happened to have my mechanic friend fix my broken floor panel, I spliced into the wire directly off the door switch while it was disassembled. It'd be easier for anyone else to use the wire on the fusebox instead of disassembling the trunk-latch and taking the floor panel off.


Here's the green wire I taped for door-open (its a ground wire). Its right behind the black door switch in the door well inside the black tubing you see.


To power the passenger side, I'll just have to dig up the wire for that... its behind the glovebox, but like I said, I didn't get around to doing it yet... soon

By the way, you could do the same thing except wire the + of the sockets to underdash fuse#6 using an add-a-circuit instead of using the IGN-OFF function that you don't have stock. Using fuse#6 for + instead would just make it so the lights work with the doors all the time instead of only when the car's off.

I'll be wiring the passenger side soon. After wiring it, I'll post how to find the door-open wires for both doors.

aCUREa

Finished wiring up the passenger side socket earlier

The wire to tap is the far right cavity toward the front (yel/grn) of this plug behind the glovebox. This plug is a gray 12-pin plug.


Here's the wire (yel/grn) and again the last cavity on the right farthest from you. This wire gets a ground when the passenger door opens. Its what powers the passenger door courtesy light.


So I mounted the bulb socket here for now (I'll end up drilling a hole in the kick panel later, but this is fine for now). All I had to do was run the ground wire of the socket (blue extension pointed out) from the footwell area up into the area behind the glovebox to tap the yel/grn wire on that plug.


After getting the wire out of the footwell area, I ran it along here behind the glovebox.


Then I simply spliced into the wire (I disconnected the battery for this just to be safe even though its a ground wire). The wire comes from the MICU, so I was extra careful with it.


Purple doesn't show up good in pictures, plus I used a real narrow bulb on this side because that's all I had in purple


Now back to the driver side: the door-open wire for the driver door is pin#2 (yel/blu) of this plug (light-green 21-pin) on the underdash fusebox. It gets a ground when the driver door opens, and no surprise it powers the driver door courtesy light. I didn't tap this exact wire when I did mine, but using it works the same.

ed-gsxr

nice write up!