GBMINI#4 (GPMINI)

After replacing the blue LEDs in the Alpine stereo for GPMINI, I’ve finally succeeded in changing all the green LEDs too – compare the new and original:

This job was a nightmare, even with reasonably suitable tools at work, due to the tiny size of the “0603” LEDs:

The more I did, the harder it got – just trying to see which end was anode and cathode is almost impossible, and the LEDs are connected in pairs on the board so if one didn’t work, two would be off! In the last picture I’ve changed all of them (took about 1-1/2 hours) but two are off – I had to resolder both because I couldn’t tell which one was the problem 😦

Anyway, it’s done! And it does look much better than blue & green in GPMINI … I originally planned to modify the second Alpine too (that will soon go in GBMINI) but I don’t think I will now; it was simply too frustrating.

(if you’re thinking of doing something similar, I used Digikey p/n 160-1121-1-ND for the two larger LEDs, and 160-1180-1-ND for the many small ones)

The Alpine I recently installed in GPMINI works very well but it’s bright blue buttons look somewhat out of place, so today I disassembled the Alpine display head to see what can be done …

So we can see a couple of small bright blue LEDs, and loads of tiny green LEDs – the green ones are tiny (1.6mm x 0.8mm) and I have nothing that small, but I do have some amber LEDs on spare toggle switch panel PCBs that are small enough to fit in the blue LED position (they are size PLCC-2, like these at Digikey) … let’s try one … it works! So do the other one and see what the buttons look like:

Not bad 🙂
Here’s a “before” and “after” in GPMINI:

It’s not perfect (because the buttons themselves are colored blue too) but I think it’s better … now I need to buy some tiny LEDs to replace all the green ones – that’s going to be a nightmare job because they’re so small 😦

UPDATE: Here’s “the story so far” at night: