LED Headlight DRL, City and Blinker bulb - resistor and wiring question

[impulse]

So currently my DRL, city and blinker bulbs are all LED with the appropriate resistor sizes as found on nicks car blog, or so I think. My first question is, can anyone confirm my resistor sizes / wiring? And then as far as the wiring I wanted to take the wires out of the headlights where I currently have the resistors tapped into, and then relocate the resistors under the fenders since I have them off. The only thing is that I’m not even sure where the resistors would go as I don’t know which ones correspond to the wires i tapped inside as the colors don’t match up and I’m no wiring guru.

Lights / resistors:
- Blinker light: Pin 9 tapped off headlight harness to 50w 6hm resistor
- DRL: Yellow and brown to 25w 15ohm resistor

- City light: Blue and brown to 25w 15ohm resistor (I’m not even sure if my city bulb lights up but I swear it did once upon a time)


Question: is it possible to tap my resistors somewhere nice and tucked under the fender and not have errors? Has anyone done this? Curious as to which wires I would need to wire a resistor into. I know the blinker one is very straightforward


I just really want to clean this up. Although you can’t really see it when it’s in the car, I’d like to have the headlight be it’s own free unit again and not have to bring along the resistors every time


Pic of the turd when it’s together




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[Charles.waite]

I have all this info for you, however it’s on my laptop and I’m on vacation until Sunday.

For the city bulbs I use some eBay inline resistors mounted inside the headlight. They don’t get hot enough to worry about, I’ve bench tested them. I can try to link to the bulbs I use later, they’re not error free but the resistors suppress the errors.

For my DRLs I use some projector style bulbs also from eBay. They’re *almost* error free but when they warm up they throw really annoying errors every few seconds. I bench tested them and their power draw drops from 8w to 7w when warm which causes the errors. I wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness I made and I get no errors and nice 5000K led bulbs that almost perfectly match my Xenons.

You can definitely splice into your main harness and wire the resistors elsewhere in the engine bay. I made a quick mounting plate using a length of aluminum L stock from Home Depot and mounted the resistors on a spot near my PS reservoir.

Again I can post back with way more details this weekend. I have a wiring diagram for the headlights and a pin out chart I made for the drl resistors should help with the cities as well as the turn signals, though I don’t know much about those.

[impulse]

I have all this info for you, however it’s on my laptop and I’m on vacation until Sunday.

For the city bulbs I use some eBay inline resistors mounted inside the headlight. They don’t get hot enough to worry about, I’ve bench tested them. I can try to link to the bulbs I use later, they’re not error free but the resistors suppress the errors.

For my DRLs I use some projector style bulbs also from eBay. They’re *almost* error free but when they warm up they throw really annoying errors every few seconds. I bench tested them and their power draw drops from 8w to 7w when warm which causes the errors. I wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness I made and I get no errors and nice 5000K led bulbs that almost perfectly match my Xenons.

You can definitely splice into your main harness and wire the resistors elsewhere in the engine bay. I made a quick mounting plate using a length of aluminum L stock from Home Depot and mounted the resistors on a spot near my PS reservoir.

Again I can post back with way more details this weekend. I have a wiring diagram for the headlights and a pin out chart I made for the drl resistors should help with the cities as well as the turn signals, though I don’t know much about those.

Well no rush, my car isn’t leaving jack stands until the end of march lol. Appreciate the help, happy thanksgiving! I’ll follow up on this thread / with you after the holiday. I’d like to totally eliminate all errors. I’ll try and find the amazon links for the things I bought but this was a while ago. I’m definitely not opposed to just buying all new resistors / bulbs if needed


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[oVeRdOsE]

I have all this info for you, however it’s on my laptop and I’m on vacation until Sunday.

For the city bulbs I use some eBay inline resistors mounted inside the headlight. They don’t get hot enough to worry about, I’ve bench tested them. I can try to link to the bulbs I use later, they’re not error free but the resistors suppress the errors.

For my DRLs I use some projector style bulbs also from eBay. They’re *almost* error free but when they warm up they throw really annoying errors every few seconds. I bench tested them and their power draw drops from 8w to 7w when warm which causes the errors. I wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness I made and I get no errors and nice 5000K led bulbs that almost perfectly match my Xenons.

You can definitely splice into your main harness and wire the resistors elsewhere in the engine bay. I made a quick mounting plate using a length of aluminum L stock from Home Depot and mounted the resistors on a spot near my PS reservoir.

Again I can post back with way more details this weekend. I have a wiring diagram for the headlights and a pin out chart I made for the drl resistors should help with the cities as well as the turn signals, though I don’t know much about those.

I have the same issue.

My Fog are tapped on my DRL circuit. so on the day my fog are lite, and when I pull the headlight switch, the fog light circuit lite the fogs.

On summer days, after few minutes I have the left fog light error, in winter around -10°C, no issue. I made a ''heatsink'' with homedepot aluminum plates, I believe it helps.

what exactly did you mean by ''wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness '' ?

op, tapping fog light to the DRL and Fog circuit, will get rid of 1 set of resistor.

DRL mode :

[impulse]

I have the same issue.

My Fog are tapped on my DRL circuit. so on the day my fog are lite, and when I pull the headlight switch, the fog light circuit lite the fogs.

On summer days, after few minutes I have the left fog light error, in winter around -10°C, no issue. I made a ''heatsink'' with homedepot aluminum plates, I believe it helps.

what exactly did you mean by ''wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness '' ?

op, tapping fog light to the DRL and Fog circuit, will get rid of 1 set of resistor.

DRL mode :

I don’t have led fogs. I have yellow bulbs which I’m okay with. You did just remind me though that I do want to do the mod where I can run drl and fog at the same time


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[Charles.waite]

I have the same issue.

My Fog are tapped on my DRL circuit. so on the day my fog are lite, and when I pull the headlight switch, the fog light circuit lite the fogs.

On summer days, after few minutes I have the left fog light error, in winter around -10°C, no issue. I made a ''heatsink'' with homedepot aluminum plates, I believe it helps.

what exactly did you mean by ''wired in a 50-ohm resistor into a patch harness '' ?

op, tapping fog light to the DRL and Fog circuit, will get rid of 1 set of resistor.

DRL mode :

I made my own patch harness between the factory headlight harness and the headlight then wires the resistors in off of that so I didn’t have to modify the factory harness.

I have pictures but they’re on my laptop so I can post them later.

[Quattro 4 Life]

So here’s what I hacked together.

The metal plates act as a heat sink. It’s worked well for a few years but recently during cold starts my right turn signal has thrown a bulb out warning until the resistor warms up, around freezing when I’ve started the car.

[Charles.waite]

Found some of my pics:

Patch harness:



Resistors mounted on a plate:



And the drivers side harness installed:



And the wires I made:



It’s definitely the overachiever’s setup. Not sure I’d recommend doing this, but it was interesting to learn I suppose.

[Quattro 4 Life]

Found some of my pics:

Patch harness:

Yep, this is what I wanted to do. Completely removable/reusable. Nice work!

[impulse]

Is the patch harness to convert from halogen to bi-xenon? My car doesn’t have that. It originally came with xenons. But yeah my end goal is to be able to take the headlight out simply by unplugging it, not by also taking the resistors out with it


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[texasboy21]

Great info!

[Charles.waite]

Is the patch harness to convert from halogen to bi-xenon? My car doesn’t have that. It originally came with xenons. But yeah my end goal is to be able to take the headlight out simply by unplugging it, not by also taking the resistors out with it


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No, mine is bixenon to bixenon but you could buy a different male side plug to match the halogen and convert them with the harness. I have the wiring diagrams from the Bentley so I could post up a picture of halogen ones later if that helps.

[Charles.waite]

Also, note in this picture I actually crimped the wires wrong...



Those rubber sealing gaskets are supposed to be crimped into the hooks on the pins, and I didn’t realize that until afterwards. They still seal fine though so it’s not the end of the world.

[Charles.waite]

Forgot about this. Just bumping this so it’ll pop up on my feed tomorrow. I’ll try to post up my wiring diagram for bixenon->bixenon as well as a halogen pinout and maybe even combine them.

[oVeRdOsE]

thanks for the info.

I have an update.

My error fog light error was due to some LED burned out from the original H8 from ebay. The power drop wasn't enough anymore.

since I can rely on H8 wattage spec on ebay , I tried to pick on that contains a lot of LED.

I bought those one :



Working great with the original 6ohms :




No code from the fog light nor the DRL ( LED H8 are connected on both circuit : Fog and DRL. )

I wish I could just vagcom this fog light error message out and get rid of these resistors...

[asg1290]

Found some of my pics:

Patch harness:



It’s definitely the overachiever’s setup. Not sure I’d recommend doing this, but it was interesting to learn I suppose.

If you don't mind me asking, where did you order the parts for the harness? I want to do something like this for my tail lights, don't want to cut anything and haven't been able to find the parts yet.

[Charles.waite]

I actually found the connectors and pins on amazon, straight off a boat from Shenzhen.

I found the part number of the male connector since it’s printed on it. From lots of random ETKA searching over the years, I know that VAG usually offsets their paired male/female connectors by one digit. So if the male connector is 8e0111222, the female counterpart is going to be 8e0111223 or 8e0111221.

I googled both and found a seller selling a pack of 5 matched pairs of connectors with factory pins and weather seals for something like $25 shipped from China. Then I just sourced the wires from a local electronics store and found the proper crimp die for my ratcheting crimper.

The crimping part is tricky and I’m sure a pro would look at my work and shake his head, it’s legitimately difficult to get the pins crimped well at all with the smallest gauge wires, but it’s serviceable.

I’ll post up my pin out excel chart in a minute, that might help out in this case.

[Charles.waite]

That’s my pin out diagram for factory Bixenon headlights. The S/L/XL designation for wiring refers to 20/16/12 AWG wires and is based on the Bentley wiring diagram wires sizes that are also listed in that chart in metric (mm). Hope that will be helpful for people who stumble on this thread.

[asg1290]

awesome, thanks so much.

[impulse]

Thanks for that. I’ve been pretty dormant on audizine, just busy with the holidays and also preoccupied trying to get my motor out


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[DC5]

That’s my pin out diagram for factory Bixenon headlights. The S/L/XL designation for wiring refers to 20/16/12 AWG wires and is based on the Bentley wiring diagram wires sizes that are also listed in that chart in metric (mm). Hope that will be helpful for people who stumble on this thread.

Thank you Charles.Waite definitely saving this for the future (spring) I most likely be asking some help questions then! Just don’t even want to pop my hood after finishing back to back service jobs on it.


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[jumartinez]

Found some of my pics:

Patch harness:



Resistors mounted on a plate:



And the drivers side harness installed:



And the wires I made:



It’s definitely the overachiever’s setup. Not sure I’d recommend doing this, but it was interesting to learn I suppose.

do you know the part number for the male connector? i can only find the part for the female connector?

[Charles.waite]

Male connector is 1j0 973 737. Female is 1j0 973 837.

This is similar to the kit I got (which is no longer available): https://www.ebay.com/itm/202339206723

[jumartinez]

Male connector is 1j0 973 737. Female is 1j0 973 837.

This is similar to the kit I got (which is no longer available): https://www.ebay.com/itm/202339206723

awesome thank you so much! 🙏🏽

why would you not recommend going this route for the resistors?

[Charles.waite]

It’s just a pain in the ass. Much easier to just cut into the factory wiring and solder leads in for the resistors.

Namely, crimping the pins was a massive pain, not sure if it was my crimper or the pins themselves but it sucked.


That being said it works great and is reversible so there is that aspect that is nice.