warning, potential bummer ahead.

So, the other day I wired up the LED baggage light via the GAD27 PWM cabin light output and it was great. Project 2 for today was wiring for the light strips that will eventually go under the glare shield, which won't go in for a while.

The plan is to run wiring for them and the defrost fans, the cap it off until the upper fwd skin gets installed, then just plug those components in.

I wanted to ops check my wire runs so I just temporarily hooked up the led strips and tried to turn them on with the GAD27 dimmers. turns out I initially had two of them controlled by one PWM circuit, and I think that the amp draw was to much for the box to handle. All 3 lights are now about 1/2 as bright as the baggage light was originally.

Research showed that each GAD27 light output can handle 500 milliamps max. I put a meter on the light strips I got from stein and discovered that they actually draw about 680 milliamps and I was briefly (accidentally) running two of them on one output.

I cut about a foot off the end of each strips and checked again with a multimeter, and they re now below 500 milliamps each, but they didn't get any brighter. I've got an email in to garmin g3xpert to see if I damaged the GAD27 or if something else is going on.

They are plenty bright for instrument panel lights as is, but I don't want to set myself up for some sort of cascading failure mode. more on this after I hear back from garmin.