Givi Motorcycle Trunk LED Mod

My motorcycle has a Givi model E52 trunk that has integral brake lights to augment the bike's existing brake lights. The E52 uses 12 incandescent bulbs that take quite a bit of power (on the order of 10 to 15 Amps). By replacing these incandescent bulbs with LEDs I was able to reduce the current requirement to about 50 mA. There is much less heat generated which is better for the plastic case and the LEDs will have a very long lifetime when compared to the life of incandescent bulbs.

Step 1 Project Tools and Supplies

For this project you will need:

1) A philips screwdriver
2) A soldering iron and solder
3) An Xacto hobby knife (for cutting circuit board traces)
4) 12 x Red LED -- high-brightness (e.g. Digikey Part # 160-1620-ND)
5) 2 x 50 Ohm resistors
6) A motorcycle or scooter with Givi E52 installed (not shown here ;-)

Optional but very handy to have:

7) circuit board vice (a third hand)
8) digital multimeter (DMM) useful if debugging is needed

Comments

[omardante]

esto ultimo haganlo en paralelo cada led con su resistencia independiente ya que si uno se daña dejan de funcionar varios, ademas los de el centro no iluminan igual que los de las orillas.

[gsteely]

Thanks very much for sharing this mod. I had seen it back in May'09 and passed it on to my Yamaha Zuma friends (a few guys are using the Givi boxes). I haven't seen anyone use your mod. yet but, the opportunity to post this again to them has come up ... We, as a group of scoot riders are always interested in MODs & GADGETS !! !! ...

[lemonie]

Nice build. How does the brightness compare? L

[scd]

These LEDs are quite bright, maybe even brighter than the bulbs they replaced. They are more directional, but I think that's OK for this application.

[theRIAA]

great idea. what program did you use to make those schematics?

[scd]

I would recommend using Eagle CAD. There is a free version available here:
http://www.cadsoft.de

There is also an Instructable on using Eagle CAD here:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Draw-Electronic-Schematics-with-CadSoft-EAGLE/