Our plan is to upgrade all the lighting on our MX-5e to LED. The goals are to make it look better and to make the car more visible on the road (i.e. use brighter lights). A small black car needs all the help it can get to be seen on UK B-roads, so we often use the side lights are day-time running lights.
The bulbs in the rear lights are 'used for both side lights and the rear brake lights. We have swapped these out for LED bulbs, to make them more responsive. The side lights are equivalent to the 5W filament bulbs but, the brake lights are slightly dimmer than the 21W filament bulb. This is not an issue because we have massively upgraded the high-level brake light on the boot.
The high-level brake light in the boot lip is a project in its own right.
We plan to upgrade all the lighting to LED and this includes the headlights. This will be looked at soon.
The existing side repeater lamps use a 5W bulb. The plastic lamps that came with our MX-5e are faded and not really in keeping with the black paintwork.
We have replaced them with these dark tint LED repeaters. They are almost invisible when off.
When lit up they are quite bright.
The Mazda MX-5 and Eunos Roadster has front amber 'marker' reflectors. This are not lit up and there is no wiring in place to do so. There is also no place to even fit a bulb.
There are also rear red 'marker' reflectors, which also have no bulbs or wiring in place.
There were MX-5 NA variants in various parts of the world that did have marker lights with bulbs and this means there are loads of after market upgrades that can be lit up. We have bought this set of four with a dark tint, to match the black paintwork. When off, they are also almost invisible.
Our plan is to wire them up as additional indicators. This means adding additional wiring and connecting it into the existing indicator wiring but, this is a really easy job.
The main issue with the set of four that we have bought is that the two front ones are amber and the two rear ones are red. We plan to replace the red surface mount LEDs in the rear ones with orange LEDs.
The indicator flasher unit on the MX-5 uses the resistive load of the bulbs to set the flash rate. This means that is a bulb fails, the indicators tell the driver by flashing much faster.
The problem with this is that if you change all of the filament bulbs to LED lights, then the load is much lower and it behaves as if a bulb has failed. The flsh rate becomes much too quick. Thee are loads of ways around this and Rob has built an electronic flasher unit in the past. There is a quick and easy modification that can be made to the existing flasher unit though.
The flasher module is this grey box, bolted way up inside the dash behind the steering wheel. It sits on a metal bracket with another black module.
The black plastic end plate hods the PCB in with two small plastic locking tabs. The PCB can easily be removed using a small screwdriver, to flex the locking tabs slightly.
I wondered what the balck timer/buzzer module fixed to the same mounting bracket was. It turns out that this is the seat belt warning buzzer.
To get a constant flash rate regardless of load, you need to remove R1 (5.6kΩ) and replace it with a 1MΩ resistor.
The flasher module looks like this once modified. I tested it and it gave a constant flash rate, even when a bulb was removed.
We are fitting personalised ambient lighting in the MX-5e using WS2812B/5050 addressable RGB LEDs. This is automatically controlled by the Driver Control Unit (DCU).
The Eunos Roadster has two cabin lights with switches, one on each side of the centre console. We initially converted them to LED but they still looked 'old', so we have designed our own solution to be 3D printed in three parts and glued together. This photo shows the face plate and opaque lens. The 3D printed parts are being smoothed and painted in satin black.
This housing is also the bit that clips into the dash, using the existing dash tabs.
The housing has a diffuser fixed inside to disperse the LED light more evenly.