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Interior lighting dimming

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petemcr

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Hello everyone, pretty new here so still a bit of a n00b :)

I've been trying to get my cars interior light to dim then go off, rather than just shutting off (because it's an old car lol)
it has a basic circuit board which basically holds the charge for a few seconds, then completely goes out and I've seen kits that can make it dim

Am I right in thinking that I could modify my original one so that it dims?

any help would be great, thanks
 
You need a power transistor which acts as an increasing resistance between the battery and the lamp to slowly decrease the current through the lamp, or a transistor which is pulsed on/off at a rate above which your eye perceives it (flicker fusion) such that the ratio of ON time to OFF time slowly changes to gradually decrease the average current through the lamp (Pulse Width Modulation)

Google the colored terms. The first method dissipates a few watts of power, so the transistor has to be mounted on the car body to act as a heatsink. The second method dissipates less, but the circuitry is much more complicated.
 
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