http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=KC5392

I just bought that. I presume it simply goes between the lights and power source. Where is the most convenient place to wire it in?

edit: 1998 Ei Verada

There was a thread in here somewhere about this sort of device. From memory, it had a problem that the car couldnt be locked if the light was still on. At the time I wondered if a diode should be placed in series with the interior lamp to prevent the lamp voltage from being sent back to the computer. The diode anode should go to the computer end and the cathode to the interior lamp end. Your thing should take its power from the 12 volt supply at the lamp.
have I understood the thing correctly??

Well bugger me I didn't realise I had to solder it all together. Guess thats why its only $20.

Anyway I have soldered it together. The way it works is you have 4 wiring posts, 2 sets of a positive and negative.
One goes to a door switch positive and negative, the other goes to one of the rear parking lights (I presume optional)
The manual has a write up on exactly how it works but most of it is gibberish to me

The gist of it seems to be that you need to wire the door switch in and one of the rear lights. Somehow that is then able to control everything, regardless of the polarity of the door switch (some ground, some connect power. Apparently the unit adjusts itself either way). When the door is open lights go on, when its closed it drains from a capacitor. Apparently you can adjust it but I see no way to do so on the board itself, there's no switches and no mention of how to adjust it in the instructions.
When one of the rear lights come on, the interior lights are supposed to go off instantly. This would occur as soon as you start the car and its in Park, or if you turned the headlights on

Ok bit of an update. I did a quick test run down stairs. By no means permanently installed I just wanted to see how it worked

The instructions are annoying, as they go into detail about some things but not others, for instance it says along the lines of "some cars have 2 wires coming from the door switch, others have 1, in the case of the latter connect the negative to the chassis"
Well hey thats fantastic, but how about explaining what the heck I do when I actually have 2 wires!? because the verada certainly does (and i'm assuming Magna as well) and BOTH of them have positive charge. One is a green wire, the other is a green w/ red stripe. The door switch provides continuity between these 2 positive wires when the door is open, and no continuity when its closed. (Correction, the manual states the switch provides continuity across all 3 points when the door is open). However the switch itself MUST be grounded for this to work (Via a screw which goes through the switch into the chassis), simply bridging the 2 positives together will not have the lights turn on

So here are my test results

Ignore the 'parking light' connectors if you don't care about them. They aren't mandatory for the device to work
Connect negative to the chassis, and positive to the 'green w/ red stripe' door wire, yes ANY of the door wires does not have to be drivers side.
Overhead light stays on for anywhere from 40 to 70 seconds before it begins to noticeably fade out, over approx 10 seconds. Both of these are way too long and need to be shortened. Since there's no mention of how to do it in the manual, i'm going to assume you need to swap capacitors or resistors to make it happen
* (If you connect the positive from the device to the 'Green' wire, then it only affects the specific door light indicating which door is open, not the overhead light.


Update: After writing the above it occured to me that likely the 'green' and the 'green w/ red stripe' wires are seperate circuits. The solid green is only a circuit to the individual door's light (verada only feature?) indicating which specific door is open. The 'green w/ red stripe' is for the general circuit which activates the overhead light and dash icon indicating 'any one of the doors are open'. I believe it would be acceptable to bridge both of these positive circuits together to the 1 positive wire on the device.
After reading the manual it states that door switches provide no continuity at all when the door is closed, and continuity between all 3 circuits when open. So it seems its acceptable to wire it to either the green w/ red stripe, OR both at the same time. I'm personally going to go with the former as i'd rather individual door lights not stay on, I only want the overhead one

Another thought I just had, the Verada does actually have a delay circuit built into it - The ignition barrel light

Aside from this kit, would it not have been possible to run an additional wire from the ignition barrel light to the overhead one?

The interior light system is hooked into the locking system for the remote control central locks.

Basically while an interior light is on, (and this basically closes the circuit on a timer) the car will think a door is open and simply refuse to lock, possibly also beeping the horn to warn of an ajar door.

What you can do, is wire it into the map lighting system instead if you are cluey enough with the map light on the map light unit and this will prevent the car thinking the doors are open.

Early Verada's have individually wired C pillar lights also. So they are don't work with the dome light in the middle unless one of the doors is open. They have diodes in circuit to make sure this doesn't happen.

What I suggest you look into since its now available and cheap enough, is a proper ETACS system which will bolt onto the fuse box in the car and plug in. It will have light delay and fade.

Around 10 wires need to be added, but you will get things like, a proper alarm, and if you get the wiper stalk from the car you get the ETACS module from, you can add the speed variable intermittent wipers to your EI also.

PM me for further info if you want.

Just noticed today that the locks don't work while the delay is in effect, that could be problematic. I'm going to solder on a different trimpot since the minimum delay is 16 seconds which is way too high. If I can get it down to ~3 seconds it should be sufficient time to not affect remote locking operation.

@mcs_xi i'm interested but have no idea what an ETACS system is. I'd prefer if you could post here for others to see as i'm sure i'm not the only one who would prefer to add delay to their magna/verada

ETACS - Electronic Time Alarm Control System.

It is a factory body computer that plugs into the back of the interior fuse/junction box near the drivers foot, and controls various things:

Fading lights,
Delay off for them
Speed related wipers
Alarm,
Central locking,
Remote central locking,
Delay for the power windows
etc

You can fit this box of magic to the back of any 3rd gen, and keep your current remote central locking, but you have to be clever with wiring. It isn't that hard as all of the wire inputs to this thing come from the existing plug at the back of the junction box, you have to add the outputs to your harness however.

Verada Xi cars (KE & F) get this system std.

In my experience, these Jaycar things fail quite quickly, and delay the locks annoyingly. I would much rather an OEM system.

Mike

milly,
my post #2 was about this problem.
The KR/KS manual on page 1136 shows I think what you have. This is 'Central Door Locking' for 'X' line 1994 models. Its the only info I have.
Pin 11 on the keyless entry control unit shows a wire coming from the dome lamp switch. Pin 2 shows a diode from pin 11 and this goes to the door switch. When the dome lamp switch is set to 'DOOR', the current from the battery flows through the lamp filament and through the wire to pin 11 and then through the diode to the door switch via pin 2. When the lamp is illuminated, the voltage on the pin 2 and pin 11 is zero volts (maybe up to say 0.75 volt). When the door is shut, the voltage on pin 11/pin 2, is 12 volt. The diagram shows that the lamp can be illuminated by current flowing through the diode and door switch, OR it can be illuminated by current passing through the transistor shown inside the control unit at pin 11, but not the diode.
When you add your add-on unit, you ground the wire at the dome lamp switch, and while ever this line is at zero volts, the door is 'logically' open.
What you have to do is to make the control unit see a 12 volt signal on pin 11. To do this, you need to disconnect the wire from the dome lamp switch, connect the diode cathode to this wire, and connect the diode anode to the dome lamp switch.
With the door open, the lamp will be on and it does not matter what state your add-on is at.
When the door closes, your unit activates, and sets the lamp on, the door switch opens, and the voltage rises on the cathode of the diode because there are components in the control module which drive the voltage to 12 volt. The diode is then 'reverse biassed', and cannot pass current from the control unit side to the add-on side, so the voltage seen by the control unit is 12 volt, and thus allows the locks to activate.

A suitable diode would be a plastic case device with about a 3 amp rating and a voltage rating of more than 25 volt. A 1N4001 will do. This is a cheap thing.
You would need to check that with the doors shut, the voltage at the diode cathode was at least 9 to 10 volt. Ideally it will be 12 volt.

Since the door delay is stupidly high anyway I wanted to fix that first. There appears to be 2 main components which control the delay and fade, the trimpot and 2 capactors

The Trimpot is a '1M' which I would read as 1,000k
One capacitor is labelled C1 on the board and is either a 470uf 25v (for 24v) or 47uf (for 12v) cap
The other is C2 and is a 470uf 25v

I tried replacing the trimpot with a 500k and it brought the minimum delay down from ~16s to 15s, not much of a difference. However the maximum delay came down from 70 seconds to 36 seconds, almost exactly half
I replaced the 'C1' capacitor with a 33uf, brought it down to 6 seconds minimum, much better. Still about 16 seconds maximum. Both of these are still too high
Tried putting a 100k trimpot in at some point but all it seemed to do is give next to no adjustment from minimum to maximum, maybe a 1 or 2 second difference. I don't know enough about how it works but it doesn't seem to be important, the caps play a larger role
Put in a 25uf on 'C1' which brought it down to 4-5 seconds before fade
Then replaced 'C2' with the 33uf, which brought it down to 3-4 seconds. But there isn't much adjustment in it, maybe 5 seconds at maximum.

I'm not 100% sure but I believe C2 affects the 'maximum delay' whereas C1 affects the 'overall but mainly the minimum delay' and the trimpot adds additional resistance to C2 and 'fades' between using C1 or C2 capacitor. Thus why a 100k trimpot has very little adjustment in it (~2 seconds) but a 1000k has a very large adjustment (~50+ seconds). Though they both have approximately the same minimum delay (which is affected significantly by swapping C1)

In short, if anyone is going to buy the kit, buy a bunch of smaller capacitors and try them. As well as a 500k trimpot because who the hell wants upwards of 50 second variance
I'd suggest putting somewhere around a 150uf on 'C2' which I estimate would be around 15 seconds. And a 15uf on C1 which should be around a second but still have a 'fade' to it. Then you can turn the trimpot with a screwdriver and tune the timing as you see fit
2 caps and a trimpot should set you back about $1.80 all up from Jaycar

Mines currently set around 3.5 seconds, and i'm able to lock the car after 4 so i'm happy. I will buy another kit and solder it up to make sure I didn't just get a dud

It would be nice to be able to bypass the central locking's 'lock out' when the door lights are on. But it seems more hassle than its worth
I prefer a short interior light delay anyway, and having it less than 5 seconds before I can activate the remote lock seems reasonable to me

I'm only trying to help with the system part of the add on. Its often the case that things arent always obvious when starting out on something, and along the way, if we dont understand, we just modify the dream until the result is good enough. I have a TP wagon and a TW sedan. The TW has all the bells and whistles, including the ETACS. This thing was mentioned in post 8. In my TW, the interior light stays on for about 30 seconds. It seems that the add on is designed to give this time delay. In your case, hanging around waiting for a lamp to extinguish seems like it takes forever. In my case I dont worry about the long delay cos theres no waiting; if you are able to do the mods to your add on, then you seem capable to do the mods I suggested. If the add on can be seamlessly incorporated into the central locking, then the actual time delay shouldnt matter.
I would draw a circuit diagram for you but this site dont allow to upload files. The instructions were a bit long, but necessary cos I cant upload a drawing. If you PM me with yr email address, I can do it that way.

or else, get an ETACS like mcs suggested.

In my case I actually want a short delay, short enough that its not going to interfere with my ability to lock the car. It's currently around 4 seconds, i'm going to fit an even smaller capacitor to drop it to approx 2.5 seconds which is plenty of time to keep the remote locking fully operational

If you wanted to post something here it would help anyone else who comes across the thread, but i'm happy enough with the restriction as its not much of a restriction for me

On the TW, with the ETACS, the light comes on when the door is opened and then closed. The light stays on for up to 30 seconds but if the key is inserted into the ignition and turned, the light immediately goes out.
I corrected the previous post because the resistor I had included, is not necessary.
If you take a good photo of the add on and pm me, I'll have a look at the design.
It's up to you.

TW doesn't have ETACs, the TH-Tw have an integrated body electronics module (BEM) that does almost
All the same functions. Etacs is for KE & KF and is a different system. Just FyI