I'm wanting to put the LED strips in my trunk lights and wire them up so that they come on when I brake. I know I'll need to buy resistors and diodes to make it work. My question is what length do I need to buy? I was looking at oznium.com and they have a
9.5" and a 19"...but it said that the part that you cut off can't really be reused again. Should I just get two 9.5" LED strips? I don't really mind it, but will I have a small gap in the strip? Thanks!

 

http://streetglow.com/site/auxlighti...mebulb3157.php

 

That's not what I'm looking for. It's got to be an LED strip to be glued in a circle...I'm just not sure what size I need to buy...I'm guessing two 9.5" ones would work.

 

you mean like these? I have them and they are stunningly bright and also really thin... plus they are 12volt.

 

If you want to make the entire red ring around the reverse lights light up, you need to buy two of the 19" strips and trim them down. The 9.5" strips are too short (by a measly inch or so) to fully go around the light, so if you use those you'll end up with a gap in the light. If you don't mind the gap then go ahead with the smaller strips, you'll save some cash. I personally wanted to avoid that gap so I used the longer ones. It's a shame they don't carry any strips with a size between 9.5" and 19" which is weird because its a pretty large jump in size when you think about it.

In any case, once you have the strips installed, you need to decide how you want them to function. Having them only come on as a brake light is the easy way. I did mine up the hard way, by using some diodes in addition to some resistors to duplicate the "parking light/brake light" effect. If you wanna do just a brake light, you don't need any resistors or anything, as the strips are 12V and work fine directly. If you want to set it up like mine, PM me again and I'll send you a wiring diagram that shows how mine is done.

Here's a video of mine that I put up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8DE6WtUm-I