One of the current trends in the automotive sector is ambient lighting, a new light-emitting diode-based technology that illuminates the vehicle interior. The light-emitting diodes are arranged in a special way in door armrests, glove box covers, and other areas to effectively conceal the light source.
To help designers become familiar with this technology and learn how to use light-emitting diode-based lighting systems, K2L has developed a new ambient lighting controller based on its field-proven OptoLyzer® MOCCA compact hardware interface.
The ambient lighting device is a small box which provides a simplistic representation of the vehicle’s interior using an arrangement of 32 light-emitting diodes. Each is controlled by one Microchip PIC16F1829LIN, a small footprint microcontroller with integrated voltage reference and a LIN transceiver. This allows each light-emitting diode to be addressed as single LIN node with a unique LIN address.
All the LIN nodes are networked and then interconnected through LIN to K2L’s new OptoLyzer MOCCA compact, which is connected via WLAN.