Ok so last year my family went to look at a new cars and my mom like the escapes and my dad liked a mustang, so my mom wanted to special order a fancy one with ambient lights and they brought her one with the wrong color seats and no lights, she said oh forget it and bought it because they rushed her and now a year later after we have had both cars she is upset my dads mustang has the lights and her car dont and she asked me to hook some up light his car, so i said yea and she asked me what supplies i need and i told her I needed a adruino and a breadboard for testing and they will be coming tomorrow so i was wondering how (see pictures) i would hook up the lights to a dimmer, on and off, and a color changer. I would like to code this myself its just i dont have the time lately, thanks TrainOnATrack
You need some transistors to control the connection of the LED cathodes to Gnd while 12V comes from the car power supply.
I'd recommend AOI-514 from Digikey.com, 50 cents each. Drive the gate thru a 220 ohm resistor with a PWM signal for dimming control. Add a 10K resistor from the Gate to Gnd to ensure the MOSFET is off when the Arduino is not driving the pin.
Arduino has 6 PWM outputs. analogWrite(PWMpin, 0); will be full off. 255 will be full on.
Using really low values may appear to flicker excessively. If so, come back and as how to change the PWM frequency from the default value of ~490 Hz.
You can control the dim level in several ways - read a potentiometer value, have some push buttons for up & down, have a rotary encoder that sends up & down pulses, have it autodim a few seconds after being turned on, etc.