Just took apart my mirror to add LEDs to the bottom and can't find a place to hook them up to the garage button. Is there supposed to be a + and - on the circuit board or something? Any help would help...

 

well typically red is positive and black negative, where are you trying to attach the leds, in reference to the garage door button?

 

eh, its a lil more complex than that. The circuit for the garage door opener is meant to send one signal at a time once u press and hold down the button, cus sending too many at once would give it an up/down confusion state. (i designed one before). Anyway, the best thing to do would be to take a multimeter and get a supply voltage or ground from the board (should be easy to find), then test the garage door button across the button leads (when pressed it should either connect to ground or source). And depending on what happens when the button is pressed, wire it up accordingly

 

^aight, I'm just trying to get LEDs to come on from the bottom of my mirror whenever the car is started because the buttons only work when the car is on anyways.

 

If you look at the connector plug that you disconnected to remove the mirror from your car, you should see a black wire with a pink stripe. This is the postive (+) that goes hot when the ignition is on. (Its the same wire you can use to power a radar detector). The solid black wire is your ground (-).
Now match these wires with the connector pins on the mirror and then trace them to wires on the inside of your mirror. You should be able to tap these to power your LEDS (with along the proper resistors to drop the voltage).
I hope this helps.

 

^ helps a lot actually. What do I do with the resistor though? do I have to attach it to the led wire and the + and -?

 

well for that you need to know what the voltage required for the leds is, (max so you dont blow them and turn on which is min), then if you check what you have coming in with a multimeter (voltage across and current through), you can add a series 9in line) resistor to drop the voltage to where you need it

 

SON OF A B!TCH!! I just blew a fuse or something trying to find the wattage with it plugged in! It went click and made a funny smell!

 

I'm not sure what you burned out, but to calculate the ohms for the dropping resistor for your LEDS, see this site:
http://metku.net/index.html?sect=vie...x_eng#parallel

I hope everything works out okay.

 

check the original thread
i just posted a bunch of stuff in there

 

great link!!!