I researched this for quite some time, and found that the easiest solution was to swap the green leds on the dash cluster with the white ones, and vice versa. It took me a couple hours with a soldering iron, but it worked, and I am digging it!

Why ford did not leave them white at night i don't know...they are still dimmable btw but not overly bright at night in my opinion.

 

What type of soldering iron do you need? Seems like a *very* small and precise tip would be necessary?

Also, how many LED's are there? I want it to be white during the day and at night--seems like more LED's would need to be added. Are they a common size we can order?

I'm still hoping for a simple wire splice to do the trick. Once I have a little more free weekend time, I may pull the console apart and figure out which wires are involved. It seems like there has got to be a wire that fires up the white and a different wire that fires upt he green (either on the actual board, or in the SJB).

 

I did it with a variable iron, but a 12 watt iron would be fine. they are SMT or surface mount leds. basically an led with four small legs that bend around the bottom of the led. i first desoldered each one by holding the led with a needlenose and applying slight pulling pressure and applying heat to two legs on one sideuntil they came free, and then doing the same with the other side. im sure you could remove an led and take it to an electronics store to order some more whites. flux is a must when re-installing the leds to insure a clean bond. I don't have an o-scope to analyze the board with, but i can tell you it is not as simple as just a wire. I am sure that it would come down to jumpering a trace on the board to activate the circuit of choice (green, or white) but without a scope or schematic i opted to swap the leds. it was pretty painless. I will attech a pic of the board so you can see what you are dealing with though.. the leds with the yellow color are the whites.

 

Thanks for the pic. Now I see what you mean. If the white LED's are readily available, I may have to try swapping all the greens for whites. Based on your description and picture, I think if there is a simpler solution that takes just a wire splice, it will be somewhere in the smart junction box.

Or maybe the aftermarket will step in...

 

I am sure there is a simlper way, but I dont have the resources to find it. the solder job was not bad at all, just a bit tedious.

 

Would it be possible to change them to red ?

LB

 

The reason they do not stay white is so that you can differentiate between the headlights being turned on or off.

 

and i will now know that my headlights are on by the awesome whiteness of the backlighting instead if the non-awesome greenness of previous times...

and yes, SMT leds are made in a rainbow of colors. i was thinking of adding some red ones on the high end of the tach

very simple to do.

 

That would look wicked!

LB

 

Here is the Manual information on the SJB illumination control. I've also heard of people mapping the CAN traffic with OBDII devices so there may be an easier way to do this mod without LED mods or the Mycolor upgrade.

 

Wow this is a cool mod.... the first person I've heard of doing it. Congrats man, thanks for sharing!

 

Got any pics of it at night

 

I'd like to see some pictures as well. I hate the green lights at night

 

If you guys can't find anywhere else, there is a guy who sells SMT Led's that a bunch of the celica guys I used to talk to did business with.

http://store.ledmod.com/

He sells them individually, which is probably what you'd want. I'm not advertising, I just did business with him in the past and he was really nice and very interested in making his customers happy.

 

Late response but anyone know how many green SMTs I'll need for the cluster I just did this all on my air vent control panel and I have a new touch screen stereo on the way I switched all my door lock and window controls to red so I gave no green lights anymore but to do the gauge I don't know if I have enough left over LEDs