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MRAP Lighting on M925A2
- Thread starter 440Duster
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peakbagger
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I am quite late to the party but bought a kit to install on a Unimog. I am tracing out the wiring in the components and drawing up a wiring diagram. I have the Control Box pretty well done and the vehicle interface box done. The wiring approach is definitely military. No common conductors, each and every light bar is fed from separate wires.
It looks like each light bar is fed DC plus and minus (red and black) from the interface box circuit breaker and then a switching circuit in the back of the IR elements (separate modules on the searchlights) is fed from one of two signal wires (white and orange). There appear to be two relays on the circuit board so I guess that the control wires pull in the relay on DC lines to select between IR and the HID. If someone who has tested this I would appreciate a confirmation. Each HID has its own ballast so it looks like if you want to mount an HID in a different housing its can be done as long as you have room for the ballast. The wiring looks quite beefy and water resistant. They did go wild with large ferrite cores on all the cables which I expect it cut down on RF. I expect the ballasts do some switching to vary the voltage up and down and therefore they could be electrically noisy. In theory if you wanted to feed a light bar separately you would either need to jump around the control board in the IR assembly or feed 12 volts to the switching wires to pull in a relay. Note that the long light bars have two control boards, one to feed the right side and one to feed the left side, they are located in the respective emitters.
By the way hidden behind the IR emitters lens are some pretty impressive LEDs. Generally HIDs are better for distance while LEDs are better for local fill so I am guessing that's why they use the combination. The LEDS are most likely optimized for IR so unless someone wants to replace them all with visible wavelength LEDs they aren't good for much except to night vision applications.
I probably will shorten up the light bars and remove the IR emitters. I plan to use at least one light bar on another vehicle.
I think there is way to put a jumper in the control box to do away with the need to put a new switch in the VIB to pull in the contactor. I wont know until I get more of it on paper.
By the way the one long light bar I opened up had a ballast that was unscrewed from the chassis, I found one loose screw but the other was missing. I don't think it vibrated out rather it was never screwed in.
Ultimately if you just want a couple of HID lights there are better ways to buy them. I doubt they will be of similar quality and if you want or need a set of HID remote controlled spotlights it will be hard to beat buying the kit. Heck the VIB box is nice auxiliary power supply panel if you don't need all the lightbars. Just realize that its not plug and play except for a MRAP. There are a lot of good parts that may be useful to adapt to another truck but they are specialized.
It looks like each light bar is fed DC plus and minus (red and black) from the interface box circuit breaker and then a switching circuit in the back of the IR elements (separate modules on the searchlights) is fed from one of two signal wires (white and orange). There appear to be two relays on the circuit board so I guess that the control wires pull in the relay on DC lines to select between IR and the HID. If someone who has tested this I would appreciate a confirmation. Each HID has its own ballast so it looks like if you want to mount an HID in a different housing its can be done as long as you have room for the ballast. The wiring looks quite beefy and water resistant. They did go wild with large ferrite cores on all the cables which I expect it cut down on RF. I expect the ballasts do some switching to vary the voltage up and down and therefore they could be electrically noisy. In theory if you wanted to feed a light bar separately you would either need to jump around the control board in the IR assembly or feed 12 volts to the switching wires to pull in a relay. Note that the long light bars have two control boards, one to feed the right side and one to feed the left side, they are located in the respective emitters.
By the way hidden behind the IR emitters lens are some pretty impressive LEDs. Generally HIDs are better for distance while LEDs are better for local fill so I am guessing that's why they use the combination. The LEDS are most likely optimized for IR so unless someone wants to replace them all with visible wavelength LEDs they aren't good for much except to night vision applications.
I probably will shorten up the light bars and remove the IR emitters. I plan to use at least one light bar on another vehicle.
I think there is way to put a jumper in the control box to do away with the need to put a new switch in the VIB to pull in the contactor. I wont know until I get more of it on paper.
By the way the one long light bar I opened up had a ballast that was unscrewed from the chassis, I found one loose screw but the other was missing. I don't think it vibrated out rather it was never screwed in.
Ultimately if you just want a couple of HID lights there are better ways to buy them. I doubt they will be of similar quality and if you want or need a set of HID remote controlled spotlights it will be hard to beat buying the kit. Heck the VIB box is nice auxiliary power supply panel if you don't need all the lightbars. Just realize that its not plug and play except for a MRAP. There are a lot of good parts that may be useful to adapt to another truck but they are specialized.
ROCKWELL-C60
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Hey guys somewhere in this site I seen eyecon instructions download and now I can't find it. Any help would be appreciated
?
?
peakbagger
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Eyecon RG33 MRAP Lighting Kit Install Manual
Scanned this in and thought someone might be interested.
www.steelsoldiers.com
Steel Soldiers has a pretty good advanced search feature. I did a search of the Misc Technical Forums for Eyecon and it popped up.
BTW, I did get the wiring diagram abut 80% complete but its not user friendly. The wiring concept is very complex, great for redundancy in a battle situation but major overkill for non battle situations. Makes retrofitting it for other uses a lot more difficult.
ROCKWELL-C60
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Thank you very much!
jdspike
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Hi Did you ever finish the wiring diagram? I'm in need.
peakbagger
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- northern nh
Nope, its on winter list post retirement. Its close but not sure how user friendly it is. I can probably PDF it. They sure put in a lot of redundancy in the wiring like they were getting paid by the foot. For my use I plan to take apart several of the Amphenol connectors and remove wiring.