Relocating the BSM to Tail Lights

I'm following as well, and have an extra set of BSM radar devices and a harness if you need.

 

Much appreciated, friend very generous of you to offer! I'll be sure to keep you posted. Hopefully this won't be so involved of a project to need the help of a radar engineer!

 

My brother also has 3-D printers, should you need any parts.

Patiently waiting for Proof of concept drawings.

 

I also am researching a rear bumper with the BSM, I will design it myself when I get around to it. A point I have found but can't put my finger on at the moment is that the BSM sensors are mounted 50 degrees on our trucks, so just follow that to begin with. That is 50 degrees from pointing to the side of the truck. This is just confirmation of your 40 degrees from the rear of the truck. You are on the right track.

 

Would be nice if some manufacture would just simply make a reconfigured tail light assembly for the Tacoma that has a spot for the BSM sensor. I would buy a set.

 

Fun fact, that "pyramid" is a trihedral reflector. We used them on the carrier to calibrate our 46 radar daily. They function the same way bicycle reflectors work. Here's a good video to describe how it works, if you're a nerd like me.

 

Sub'd .. Really good ideas in this thread !

 

Oh, Damm now Toyota engineers and marketers are going to claim our trucks have military technology. Anyhow thanks for the video link. I will now be looking into making one of those reflectors for my own BSM experiments. TechStream seems to have the procedure of alignment incorporated.

 

I have a truck cap for camping and gear security. Do you think the sensors could be relocated above the bed? I assume RADAR works through fiberglass. I'm thinking of the useless space at the back corner of the cap, above the taillight.

 

Give it a try! Seems relatively easy to test out

 

Alright boys, it's been a minute since an update, but I wanted to get things cleaned up enough to have something worth showing to y'all. I had these printed in Nylon 12 and grafted them into some eBay tail lights. The LED lenses are SLA printed in Accura 60 sanded with 180 grit so that they'll be pretty opaque and as close to evenly lit when the LEDs are on as it can get without being gaudy white hunks of plastic when they're off.




Lens will sit on top of this, it'll be a challenge to get it sealed up again but I think plastic welding the corners with butyl around the edges should hopefully get it done and keep it water tight. I might try sending them to some of the guys who do brake/headlight modification professionally though so that it's done right.




Shitty mockup with the BSM in the bottom, but you get the idea. It'll fit nicely in there with some slight cuts and adjustments.




And now the money shots:

Brake lights, Baja Designs to match the Meso 3rd brakes I've got on the cab and the soft top. Tough to take a picture of them because they are BRIGHT. I might honestly need a dimmer for these they're so ridiculously bright, and it might be a bit much to have 6 of these rock lights blasting folks in the face at night. But for sure no one will miss that I'm hitting the brakes.



Here are the running lights/turns/marker lights, made with Diode Dynamics red strip LEDs





Next steps are getting the reflectors in the side slot you can see, then making sure everything fits with the BSM. I've got some aluminum bar that I'll bend to make a bracket for that to mount to, cut holes in the housing where needed so it can clear it, and boom we'll be ready to test. Once I've had a chance to do that I'll report back.

 

@MESO You gotta check this out!

 

Subbed for interest!

 

This is great! I love to see this level of commitment and tenacity in an experiment. These are going to look amazing

 

Let's hope that it works! If not then it'll be a challenge to redesign them so they don't look wonky lol

 

subbing

 

Holy shit this rocks so hard. Keep it up! Let's get a kick starter going on these bitches!


ETA: Just curious, why aluminum bar for the mounting instead of 3D printing something?

 

I could probably mock something up to 3d print, but I have aluminum bar on hand and won't have to spend time designing, waiting for it to get made, etc. etc. If it doesn't need to look pretty and I already have it on hand, then I'll go with that

 

Small update, but I needed another crack at getting the tail light housing's backing to mount the facia I designed, and bought the cheapest brake lights on eBay and lo and behold it's sealed with some terrible kind of RTV that came right off!