Help with wiring rock lights to dome light

I have a 2015 Tacoma Sport and need help on where to tap my cheapo Amazon rock lights to turn on with the dome light and/or when doors are opened. Already wired to my switch box and it works, but now want it to turn on with the dome light to free up a switch. I found where the dome fuse is, but it doesn’t work there. Thanks in advance.

 

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/courtesy-and-rock-lights.519707/#post-17995327

This for a 3rd gen truck but hopefully it’ll help. I’d like to do something like this too so I’ll be sub’d.

 

Wouldn't you have to turn the interior lights on to turn the rock lights on then?

 

There’s a switch to turn on all the lights when you want just when you open your door you can have certain ones turn on.

 

Could tap a relay into the little sensor for the door open/close status but this would be good for door courtesy lights.

why wouldn’t you put the rock lights on a switch?

 

The dome light is controlled by the body ECU and does a fade out to off. People have wired the map lights to the dome light successfully, but I wouldn’t add a bunch of rock lights to that circuit. So, regardless, you need a relay. I don’t know what a relay will do with a fade out. It may shorten the life of the relay. If you wire the relay to the door switch, you should put a diode in the wire to the body ECU so you aren’t feeding voltage to the ECU when the door is closed.

 

Thanks all. I already have a separate switch for the rock lights. I just want it to also turn on when the dome light turns on (courtesy light) when I unlock the truck.

 

I would stay away from wiring additional lights to the Body ECU Circuit.

 

https://dsimsolutions.com/pages/domerock-v4-3rd-gen-tacoma-installation-instructions

 

Very nice! And he’s a TW member.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...tesy-rock-lights-v4-by-dsim-solutions.545892/

 

That is for a 3rd Gen. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that will not work on my 2nd Gen.

 

Ask the seller...
The dimming (Blue wire) on the 2nd Gen is also a PWM type exactly like the Turd Gen.
If ALL the lamps in the interior light circuit are swap for LED's and all the LED (rock Lamps also) DO NOT exceed 7.5A then no need for a module.
Another option is a Solid State Relay, no internal parts to move about so no coil chatter when dimming to off.

 

If your rock lights on/off are run on a relay that's controlled by the switch you already have, then you could run a separate wire to the relay control that's tapped into the dome light "power" wire. This would require pulling a wire through above the headliner (or possibly removing a portion of the headliner temporarily) to the A-pillar and running it down the inside of that pillar; which is a huge pain, but it's the simplest wiring solution to synch the rock lights with the dome.

If you just want to synch to the doors opening, it might be possible to tap into the switch on the door frame; I'm not sure whether or not that switch goes "hot" when the doors are opened or when they're closed, though and that might only synch the lights to one particular door if it works.

One thing to make sure of if you want the lights on whenever the dome is on is that the lights are powered from an "unswitched" circuit or directly from the battery rather than from a circuit that's only on when the ignition is on. I generally wire my lights to only run when the ignition is on in order to avoid accidentally killing my battery by leaving them on without the alternator running, but that's not something that's necessary for everyone to do.

 

I hate to be rude, but you have no idea how the dome light circuit works. Here is the simple basic explanation. The dome light is powered all the time. The door switch provides a negative trigger to the body ECU when the door is opened. The body ECU supplies a ground for the dome light. The body ECU uses pulse width modulation to accomplish a fade out to off.

 

Does that mean the on/door/off switch is changing where the "ground" side of the dome lamp socket is connected, rather than where the "hot" side is connected?

 

Yes. Dome light always has power. The switch connects the negative side of the light to ground or to the body ECU or to nothing.

 

I've got a limited amount of electrical engineering knowledge (I can read basic schematics and design/build moderately complex logic gate systems and simple amps/timers as well as do basic mods like adding capacitors into a circuit to clean up a DC power feed), but that kind of configuration seems like it's unneccesarily prone to shorting or other kinds of failures that could end up draining the battery and leaving the vehicle disabled if it's parked for a while.

 

Well they have been doing it that way for a long time with no major issues that I am aware of. It is a Japanese thing to switch the return leg (sinking) instead of the power leg (sourcing) of a circuit.

Either work equally well.

 

Resurrecting this thread.

Where do I find the Dome Light Ground Trigger wire on a 2-Gen?

 

It's in interior fuse block location at the bottom left of the steering wheel.
There is no connector in the a pillar like the 3G taco.

I wonder if there is a way to get to the wire in the a pillar because my fuse panel is a disaster (clean but shit ton of wires) because of my remote starter.