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: