Ambient Lighting Upgrade for Land Cruisers (1 Viewer)

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May 13, 2018
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Cudahy,WI
The following is a tutorial to add ambient lighting to the shifter/center console area via the unused holes in the front center overhead console of your 200 series Land Cruiser. This was done on a 2015, but other years should be similar.

Parts required:
  • 3mm LEDs of your color choice (I chose cool white)
  • Thin wire, 22 or 24 Gauge. I used some stripped Cat 5 wiring I had and it was perfect.
  • Heat Shrink tubing, 1/16" and 3/16"
Tools required:
  • Flathead and phillips screwdriver
  • Dremel with grinding bit
  • Soldering iron with fine tip, solder, flux
  • Lighter for heat shrink
  • Wire stripper/cutter
I am actually going to revise this project a bit. I am going to file/sand the end of the LED flat, this will keep the light from diffusing to the sides and direct it down to eliminate any blinding/sparkle. But anyway, on to the procedure!


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Remove the front row center overhead console. Remove screws circled in red and remove the black plastic shroud.

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Remove the switch for the lights and dremel out channels for your new LEDs to be installed.

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Solder up a wiring harness as described in the photos. Use thin wire and do not have excess between the two LEDs. Any excess here will not let the circuit boards be reassembled. Leave about a foot of wiring past the LEDs to connect to the circuit board.

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Reassemble overhead console, fish wires out as shown. Leave a decent bit of length here for future disassembly. Make sure the wires are not pinched because the switches won't work right if the board can not seat fully.

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Solder wires to LED illumination contacts on board. These are already appropriate voltage for LED so you do not need any resistors in your circuit.
Blah blah increase amp draw through the circuit blah blah. There were empty spaces for LEDs on the circuit board so my best guess is Toyota-san allowed for some additional load on the circuit. Havent popped anything, YMMV, etc.

Be careful soldering, if you bridge the two connections you are gonna burn out something in your interior lighting circuit, and that something could be expensive!

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Meat and potatoes here folks! These are the pins to get power for the LEDs.

Tuck your wires in behind the circuit board, if you do not, the sunroof switch wont be fully depressed by the black plastic cover and will rattle.

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Hi little lights!

Test it out, reassemble it, enjoy your ambient lighting.
 
Do you have any pictures of the lights when operational? When do they light up or are they always running? Interesting little hack and could be a fairly simple mod.
 
Lights are on with interior illumination. They are tied into the lights for the sunroof so whenever those are on the ambient lighting is on.
I did sand the face of the LEDs to square them off and pushed them further back inside the housing to eliminate the "sparkle" I was getting.

I will try to get a picture but it might be somewhat tough. They are pretty awesome though, did my drive to work in the dark today and loved it. Should have come this way from the factory.
 
Here are a couple other ways to do that too.


 
I was not a fan of the way the wiring is tied in on the 200-specific tutorial, and the other tutorial is for a 100. I did use them as inspiration for my interior lighting upgrade.
 
Interesting that they left those holes blank for the LC... Is 30 cents in ambient LED's really a differentiation for the LX570? (Have 08 LX, holes come stock with amber ambient LEDs)
 
Yup, it’s been discussed in various threads previously. Unfortunately there’s no simple way to just pop bulbs in or swap components out for LX ones...
 
If a guy bought an LX overhead console, the board could be pulled out and modified to run just the LEDs, that would look factory, or as close to factory as you can get.

Otherwise just wire up some lights of your chosing and get them installed.
 
I thought someone on here tried that without success, but I don’t recall the specifics offhand...
 
Well the whole LX console won't work, and even the boards won't work. But you could pull the boards out and jump just to the LEDs using the power method I described or via a different method. Then you would have OEM lighting.

But holy crud is that a lot of work to replicate two 99cent LEDs.
 
I'm going to do this but my LC does not have a sunroof. Can I still wire it this way?? Will my board have these connectors?
 
I can tell you that the circuit board did have unused spots for LEDs but can't comment what is or is not in place on the non-sunroof versions. Do you have the SOS button in the middle? That has an LED backlight as well.
 
I'm going to check if there is any switch that is backlit on that some light and see if I can tap into it...but this seems a great mod thanks
 
No backlit lights on my overhead console but I’m still going to look at this mod. My footwelllights are blue I’m hinkning if I used amber as in’s the old lx’sits Mottling then on look good... you guys suggest blue led as in the footwells ANYPNE WHO HAS A LATER LX MODELAND SHARE WITH US THE COLOR OF THEIR AMBIENT LIGHTING.
 
You'll see when you get it apart where the LEDs mount. The challenge is there are no traces on the circuit board that match up to the LEDS, so its not as simple as just pop them in and solder them off. You will still need to run some thin gauge wire to your new LEDs, factory take outs or no.

I picked the location I did for the wiring since Toyota had already dropped the voltage to an LED-Friendly voltage and it was an illumination circuit. I would be hesitant to pick up power from an unknown source as it may be 12V or not tied into the illumination circuit.
 
@ArnieC
Thanks. Sounds good. So if I'm reading your correctly there are space on the switch circuit board for the four push button switches, spot, door, on/off & spot. If the text on the switches are opaque then I may try and set four LEDs there and two for the ambient lighting, all wired in series to the low voltage spots on the larger circuit board.
 
The switches for spot, door, on/off & spot I believe are opaque as they were never lit from the OEM, I never tried backlighting them. Would be cool if you could though.

The spots for the two ambient LEDs are there, but there are no traces, so nothing to connect to.
 
Thanks! I'll post up pics from the LX console when it arrives.
My hope is to extract the two LX ambient LEDs & four of the five LX push button switch light LEDs (LX has 5; spot, door, on, off, spot) in order to retro fit the LC switch.
Fingers crossed
 

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