4 - LED Fun and Final Wiring - I would wait until the next day to do this part, because if you’re paranoid like me, you want the epoxy to cure.
This step will have two parts. Wiring the plug to the Accessory socket, and wiring the plug to the led/switch. The LED and switch are totally optional, so I’ll leave them to last.
For $4 at Pep Boys, I bought this:
I clipped off the battery clamps, and now i have a 12v socket to plug my iPod charger into.
Since I was inside, I chose to solder the leads of the socket to the Molex plug (from step 3. If you’re unfamiliar with soldering, you could use Taps or butt splices, but soldering is better.
Tape these off. Now you can attach the socket to the bottom of the bin if you like. Plug the charger into the dock and the socket and manage the cords however you wish. This is what I did.
Duct tape seems to hold just fine. If the stuff falls off inside the console it doesn’t have anywhere to go anyway, so it just needs to hold as you install it.
Now to the LED. First of all, installing the LED was an interesting experience in itself. I installed an LED (from PepBoys, $7 for a pack of 3) on the side of the well opposite the iPod dock.
The instructions say drill a 7/32" hole for the LED and it's little plastic grommet:
However, the plastic of this particular box is pretty thick. The LED grommet wouldn't fit through the hole with the LED, and if you removed the LED, put the grommet through, and attempted to install the LED from the back, the grommet's opening was too small to fit the LED in. I ended up having to cut off two of the four "arms" of the grommet with an X-acto, drill out the hole the next size larger (15/64") and make it oblong with an X-acto for the two remaining grommet arms. I was finally able to CRAM it in there. From the front, it looks fine:
To add an added layer of peace of mind, I used Ol' faithful:
Now, if you want, you can just connect the two wires of the LED to the two small wires coming off the molex connector, and the light will always be on. Red to red, black to black.
However, I didn't want it to be on all the time (when there's no pod in the dock). So I devised a way to switch it on and off with the pod itself. I started with this switch here:
The idea was to depress the switch when the iPod was inserted. The switch would have to be installed here:
This way, the lever would be inside the dock area. However, due to the tight area we're talking about here, I needed to modify the lever. So I first bent the lever out like so:
But that wasn't very effective. So I clipped it shorter (so that less movement was required to trigger the switch), and folded it over to make a smoother surface for the ipod to actuate. Here is what the final lever looks like:
You’ll want to position the switch so that the ipod juuuust activates it when you put it in. It’s a complicated process of holding the iPod, the bin, and the switch, and pulling the ipod in and out and listening for the click of the switch. Once you’ve found a position for the switch where it’s not hard to get the ipod in and out, and it throws the switch, put the iPod down and without moving the switch, mark off the corners of the switch. I had to use an X-Acto for this, because a sharpie wouldn’t be precise enough.
Epoxy the switch in there, and once that’s dry enough (an hour), you can solder it to the LED and the power source. I’m not going to get into the specifics of wiring a switch, but basically you wire it so that when the switch is depressed, the 12v source is connected to the red wire of the LED, and when it’s let up, it’s not connected to anything.
Round the wires up and tape off your connections. Now you’re ready to put it in the car. It’s plug-and-play from here.
Good luck!
