Continue reading »]]> I’ve recently painted the NEX flash to be black to match my body better. Here are steps to disassemble the flash and some pictures.

the grey flash

Remove the side tabs by prying them, they are held by double sided tape

Remove the 4 black screws, 2 at each side

Remove the small piece of metal and put it aside, this metal is so small. I dropped it and it took me half an hour to find it in my crowded room

Disassemble by pulling the top cover off

Pull the metal rod out

Preparing for spray painting

A stage to hold the side covers

Painting in progress

Paint used is Krylon Fusion for plastic – satin black

Painting done

Reassembled

Final result, the Sony Nex-5N with Vivitar Series 1 90mm f2.5 (Bokina)

Continue reading »]]> As you all know, there’ll be error indicators when changing from halogen to xenon due to different loading of the bulb. In my case the error persists on the dash but the xenon can still be powered up but they flickers. To mimick the load of halogen, capacitors were installed so that during LCM test they will drain current (to charge up) fooling the LCM that the bulb is okay. After installing the capacitor, xenon will no longer flicker. Please refer to earlier post for picture and value of capacitor. Unlike resistor that gets hot during operation because it dissipates power in the form of heat, capacitor does not. In a DC environment, capacitor only uses power to charge and once it’s full there’ll be no current flowing through it.

So thats the deal with my low beam warning, no warning for high beam because I’m still using halogen. Warning left is the parking/pilot lamp because they are removed due to no place to put in a quad projector setup. Unlike the low beam which is high powered, the parking lamp bulb is marked as 5W so it is cancelled with resistors. Not to keen to write anymore so on to pictures, leave me question if you have any..
Error in INPA

Putting the resistor in

One side down, another side to go

Continue reading »]]> Before

After

Output comparison

Comparison between 55W halogen with 35W HID, HID is more efficient because most energy is converted to light while halogen radiates a lot of heat

Low beam before (halogen)

Low beam after (HID)

High beam before (2X 55W halogen)

High beam after (bi-xenon shutter)

Done

All in all I’m okay with the result, not very happy with the high beam and I’m blaming the cheap bulb for that. Suspecting that the arc chamber is skewed causing the light to be off center. Will try to get new proper bulbs and keep these as spares. Probably going for 55W ballast next time for crazy output. Hope this would help anybody looking for a guide or help.

Continue reading »]]> A simple circuit was designed to handle the existing control input from the car. When flashing with the low beam off, activate the halogen and its projector shutter. But when low beam is on, high beam or flash activates the bi-xenon shutter. Schematic as follows

Circuit produced

Another set of relay is used to convert the 3 wire AL solenoid to 2 wire input. We need to enable the strong pull solenoid momentarily before then activating the weak solenoid to hold the shutter down. Schematic follows, the capacitor would allow short energization of relay until it is fully charged, resistor is to discharge the capacitor

The relay set

Capacitor for HID to solve flickering problem

Capacitor for angel eyes, also for flickering problem