Katdash Airhead Instrument Lighting

tor tabs were breaking off. It was a big mess. My husband Paul is an EE, and anything electrical on the bike, I hand off to him. We were looking at my flex circuit board for the 3rd winter in a row, with great disgust and frustration, when Paul said" this is ridiculous- I can build this new and better with leds." I jumped on that concept with great relief, and over the following year we developed and tested these new solid state led flex circuit boards. Many of us have been patching these for years, or sending them to various shops to have them patch or replace the light board with a good used unit. I’m an Architect- I can design a steel beam to hold up a house, and I’ve got a cad system, but I don’t do electricity. Paul is a professional EE and does pcbs & software for a living. We began with version 1 (of 3) of the instrument pod- not because it’s version 1, but because I ride a R75/6. We started by 3D modeling the oem plastic bodies and getting them 3D printed. Then Paul designed a schematic with leds and the required resistors based on the original /6 flex circuits. He referenced Snowbum’s emergency GEN resistor design for the early prototypes. Then we made paper test pcbs. Lots and lots of paper test pcbs with leds & resistors glued on, and wired up with 32ga hookup wire. We tested light brightness, we tested light locations (for the instrument gauges). We did several different versions of the GEN excite current resistor design and did MORE test boards. Then we took those test boards to a Rally, and tested them on multiple bikes to get real rpm readings on the GEN circuit light. We built real prototypes with actual manufactured flex circuits, and I had 2 different molds made for the plastic bodies. There was nothing remotely close to the original connector pins- so I have a local machine shop make those for me. We sent these actual flex prototypes to Airhead pros and other riders around the country for 5 months of actual road testing for the summer of 2016. We found some unexpected bugs with the oem turn signal relay, and some surprising bugs- it’s amazing just how small of a ground leak (especially riding in the rain) will light an led. So Paul fixed the bugs, and we sent out the flex for actual production manufacture. Each unit is hand assembled by us. We plug each one in at assembly and make sure it’s operating properly, and passing the correct current. Then they are carefully packed in static guard bags and bubble wrap for shipping. We built these to be the highest quality boards we could design- a light board I could & have put in my own bike, and never have to open the instrument pod again.