I had a 3T Superb 2 before the Kodiaq and it had these nice lights in the boot lid that lit up the boot and the ground around it.  

 

The Kodiaq has pretty ordinary boot lights so I wanted to do something about it.

 

There are some clip-in panels that cover the bolts that hold the rear light clusters in.  The inner ones looked pretty much perfect for my requirements so I 3D printed in translucent ABS plastic some lights with integrated screws.

 

The light element is a small linear LED strip.  It's clamped to a piece of 1mm aluminium as a heat spreader.  The alum strip is screwed to the printed part.  On the back of the alum strip is a small buck converter to lower the voltage from the vehicle supply (12 up to 14.4 volts) down to something more appropriate.  I chose a voltage that sets the current at about 50mA per LED, which equates to around 0.5W each.  This is a good compromise between light output and heat generation.  The low current also means that I'm not overloading the circuit that supplies the boot lights.

 

There is a schottky diode in series between the supply current (the existing boot lights in the carpet trim) and the new lights I added to prevent the filtering on the buck converters from back-flowing to the car.  When I tried without this diode, the lights would occasionally set off the car alarm when locked.  I'm not sure why the car was monitoring the boot light circuit for the alarm.  Perhaps it was some sort of back EMF capacitively coupled to the boot-latch circuit as the cables would likely run a large distance in parallel with each other.  The diode seemed to sort it.

 

I ran a wire from the left-side existing boot light, up the D pillar, through the flexible trunking and down to the holes in the boot trim.

 

The 3D printed parts are basically copies of the existing plugs that were in the holes. minus the little string that trapped the cover.

 

I sprayed the front of the light with a light coat of tail-light-tint spray to make it less visible when not powered on.  The spray was a bit blobby but the boot-door trim is textured anyway so it doesn't look too bad.

 

The light output is quite impressive, even for just 50mA.

 

If you want to do the same, I've uploaded the printed part to the thingiverse here: (Thingiverse keeps crashing on upload, I'll update it once I get the upload to work).

Impressive! I’ve not opened my tailgate in the dark yet, so don’t know how good or bad the lights are, but you’ve made a very neat solution to your problem.

👍

NIce ..

Great effort, its amazing what can be done with 3D printers!

I can't get thingiverse to accept my uploads so I've attached the files below:

- SKP (Trimble Sketchup file) if you want to edit it

- STL (lithography file) if you don't want to edit and just put it in your slicer

 

Print one flipped in X to create a mirror image (left and right sides of the car).

 

I used the following settings on my kossell delta printer:

- 0.3mm per layer

- 3 outside loops, outside inwards printing

- 25% infill

- 3mm brim

- No raft

- Supports were turned on at >60degrees to support the flat clip end

(I use KissSlicer and Repetier).

kodiaqbootlight_v0.5.skp kodiaqbootlight_v0.5.stl

19 hours ago, Manc-Fletch said:

Impressive! I’ve not opened my tailgate in the dark yet, so don’t know how good or bad the lights are, but you’ve made a very neat solution to your problem.

👍

 

I guess it depends on where you park.  You've always got the handy torch in the boot too.  I find that the torch in its mounting spot tends to shine straight in my eyes making it harder to see things in the boot.

 

I'm trying to figure out a way to get the third row lights  in the headlining to come on with the boot too, but they're switched to ground via 2 paths so that is getting complicated in terms of building diode logic.

 

16 hours ago, silver1011 said:

Great effort, its amazing what can be done with 3D printers!

 

Thanks silver1011.  To be honest, the 3D printer is just a low effort way to make complex shapes.  Someone with more patience than me could easily make it out of acrylic or similar using ****** files (or a mill) or other processes.