Im always looking at things i can do to my car, electrically. Most modern cars have a door indicator in the dash for each individual door. Since my magna elite has a light on the actual door, and not the dash i figured it wouldnt be hard to wire up one of my own.

Before i go into the details of this, ill post a picture of the final result.

http://www.upurload.com/files/dc981ac894d8c3c922cf273ee0739265.jpg

http://www.upurload.com/files/d812202198075c673660008568a3bd18.jpg

To do this, i needed to wreck the automatic gear selector part of my instrument cluster. The drive light still comes on for cruise control. I replaced the park, reverse and neutral lights with white led's to light up the car diagram.

Since my dad is a sign writer, making the diagram was easy.

I wired into the door open switches of each individual door, but the switches give a negative voltage. So the door indicator on the dash needed a constant positive feed which i got from the footwell light. The dashboard logo actually fades out with the dome light. It does not come on at all when i put my headlights on.

There is a bit of messy wiring on the back of the instrument cluster, and i cut the gear selector wires straight off the dashboard wire connectors. This car will never be automatic again. This is mainly for a car that was once an automatic. You need an automatic instrument cluster to do it easily.

I wont go through all the details unless someone else wants to do this.

If you want to do it yourself, please inbox me or reply on this thread and i will give you a wiring diagram and explain the entire process. It took 2 days to do.

sounds interesting, wouldnt mind having a read through your process

ok, so to start with i had to get a wire from each door to the dash board. I used standard speaker wire. I only needed one per door. The switches operate on a negative voltage. When you open a door, both switch wires are connected to ground. I used a wire stripper to take off insulation but not cut the wires.

That makes the signal from the door very simple. There are now 4 separate negative wires that correspond to each door being opened.

The green door indicator lights are all LED's with a positive power from the drivers footwell light. There are also 3 white LED's. These LED's share the same positive power. They light up the yellow car logo, and fade out with the dome light. The door lights do not fade, just the car logo.

I knew there was no easy way around it, so to wire all these lights and completely isolate them from the instrument cluster, i connected them all to separate gear selector lights.

The gear selector lights have diodes. I took these out. I had to cut a fair bit out of the wire flex strips in the instrument cluster. I also pulled out two of the three plugs that are in the dashboard and can be seen when the instrument cluster is out. I located and cut the gear selector wires from behind the plugs. The wires i cut are now completely isolated from any part of the vehicle.

All i had to do then was join these wires to the signal wires i got from the doors.

I will get a picture tomorrow, but if you were to see the back of the instrument cluster, you would see a mess of speaker wire, solder and masking tape.

I taped in the four green LED's against the gear selector lights plastic housing that is physically attached to the instrument cluster. I had to remove the fuel and temp. gauge to do this. The 3 white LED's fitted in nicely where park, neutral and reverse lights used to be.

Also i had to use a craft knife to cut out the rectangular window for the diagram. I then attached a vinyl sticker to the back of the fuel/temp. gauge. This had to be accurate, otherwise the lights would not be in the right spots.

The hardest part for me was actually putting the fuel and temperature needles back on. Its so hard to do and to still have them read accurately.

Thats basically it. Tomorrow i can post a wiring diagram of just the instrument cluster, and some photos. I can go into more detail of parts i didn't completely cover.

Awesome idea. Definitely planning to add this to my mod list.

If you want to make it look a little more factory, I'm pretty sure JDM cars got an indicator like that below the speedo.

Here is a wiring diagram i made:
http://www.upurload.com/files/051915776666cc9bb91db7c8939017aa.jpg

The following pictures have a huge resolution. They are of the instrument cluster. You may need to download them to see them
http://www.upurload.com/dfile/png/dimage/9473.png (http://www.upurload.com/file.php?name=6b42a31afe107ca46dc417c6e0dce0be.jpg )

http://www.upurload.com/dfile/png/dimage/9474.png (http://www.upurload.com/file.php?name=e23c40e7b10815e7af3e7dd046c94696.jpg )

This is of the inside of the cluster, hidden underneath the fuel and temperature gauges
http://www.upurload.com/dfile/png/dimage/9475.png (http://www.upurload.com/file.php?name=ff3e2e1e767701b1e1643e7a581bc766.jpg )