Technostalgia tail lights hyperflashing

[rtcat600man]

Originally Posted by camguynj

How long have you had them on?

Over two years

[RenegadeXR]

Originally Posted by rtcat600man

Got to LOVE the search button on this forum. My lights just did the same thing today as the OP described. Figured it was the resistors. Looks like it has been confirmed from what I have read. Time to get a new set of those and replace them. Thank - you all for the posts and posting it all up for others to learn.

It's really easy to tell if a resistor or connection to a resistor is bad. Just start the car, let it run for a minute, and touch the two resistors that come bolted to the metal plate you're supposed to stick to the inside metal of your car's inner taillamp area. If one or both resistors are cold to the touch, they aren't taking load. Swap the resistor packs between lights and see if it's always the same one.

In my case, *both* resistor packs would have one resistor stay cold when attached to my passenger side bulbs. It wasn't resistor failure. I ended up directly splicing the resistors into the black and brown wires of the stock tail light harness and this fixed it. What I basically did was connect them directly in parallel with the bulb, which makes the car happy and avoids hyper flashing. The orange wire harness they give you is just a convenience factor, but it can still fail or become disconnected internally from the bulb.

These lamps have a shitload of flaky connections that can come loose in normal driving. They don't use self-locking connectors to the circuit board, or more preferably, just use solder. They can be wiggled free with the littlest tension. I now try to avoid removing these bulbs more than necessary because I can loosen other stuff up and cause more issues. That's why instead of trying to figure out if the orange resistor harness had a loose connection at its termination point on the lamps's circuitboard, I just left the lamp installed in the car and bypassed the connections for the resistor.

[rtcat600man]

Originally Posted by RenegadeXR

It's really easy to tell if a resistor or connection to a resistor is bad. Just start the car, let it run for a minute, and touch the two resistors that come bolted to the metal plate you're supposed to stick to the inside metal of your car's inner taillamp area. If one or both resistors are cold to the touch, they aren't taking load. Swap the resistor packs between lights and see if it's always the same one.

In my case, *both* resistor packs would have one resistor stay cold when attached to my passenger side bulbs. It wasn't resistor failure. I ended up directly splicing the resistors into the black and brown wires of the stock tail light harness and this fixed it. What I basically did was connect them directly in parallel with the bulb, which makes the car happy and avoids hyper flashing. The orange wire harness they give you is just a convenience factor, but it can still fail or become disconnected internally from the bulb.

These lamps have a shitload of flaky connections that can come loose in normal driving. They don't use self-locking connectors to the circuit board, or more preferably, just use solder. They can be wiggled free with the littlest tension. I now try to avoid removing these bulbs more than necessary because I can loosen other stuff up and cause more issues. That's why instead of trying to figure out if the orange resistor harness had a loose connection at its termination point on the lamps's circuitboard, I just left the lamp installed in the car and bypassed the connections for the resistor.

Good to know information.....Thank - you

[joeyofblades]

Originally Posted by Camaro Dude

^^^^^ Having owned these, and even complimented them in the past, the truth is, that these guys are "experts" at screening calls. These lights are hit and miss. The later models were better than the earlier ones. The Hyperflashing problem, as this thread is titled, was never THE problem of these lights.

I never actually called them, just emailed. But you're saying they filter communications based on people who have contacted them before to avoid customers coming back constantly with new issues? If so, that's pretty shit. I've never met a good company that wants to avoid customers rather than standing behind their product. At least tell me you aren't going to do anything for me or that my warranty, if any, is expired. Don't play phone tag with me and duck my calls.

Originally Posted by Camaro Dude

Premature burned out LED bulbs on the one-piece afterburner was and still IS a problem, and Customer Support once you have been on their radar screen and screened , is a HUGE problem, unless you visit them in person of course.

There is a girl that liked my Instagram pictures of my 5th gen and I checked her page out. She has afterburners and said after about a year, one or two of the LEDs has gone out in one of the rings and now the tail lights look kind of stupid because one of them has an incomplete ring. I've actually made the resolve based on this and my Technostalgia issues to never buy aftermarket tail lights for a car ever again... Stock bulbs are easy to work with and reliable. It seems like aftermarket parts always get condensation in them, have LEDs burn out, have wiring/connectors fail, or other dumb issues that result from cheap hardware and poor assembly. I know everything fails eventually but this is crazy for a $400 pair of lights to have issues every few months.

Regarding the call screening... yeah, I'm only going with companies that have proven customer service from now on. Eventually I'm going to want projector headlights to replace my non-RS ones, but I'm going to research it for weeks before I make a purchase... Or just buy the factory RS headlights and the harness once I find out where to get them.

Originally Posted by rtcat600man

Got to LOVE the search button on this forum. My lights just did the same thing today as the OP described. Figured it was the resistors. Looks like it has been confirmed from what I have read. Time to get a new set of those and replace them. Thank - you all for the posts and posting it all up for others to learn.

Yeah man, no problem. I'm really glad every time someone gets to learn from my mistakes and procedures. I try to make a YouTube video for everything I do successfully, just so someone else who is where I used to be can have it a little easier. The key thing for figuring out if it's the resistors or not is to rip the double sided tape off and switch them with the other side - if the problem switches to the other side, it's the resistors. If not, you need to check the connections in the housing itself by removing the housing and using a flathead to push them all down towards the motherboard.

I think at this point, this is the "master" troubleshooting/problem thread for the Technostalgia lights. Many thanks to OP for encouraging me to look at this issue and write up my own notes and YouTube video on this stuff. Not trying to ruin Cool-LEDs' rep or anything, but as buyers we need to stick together and make each other aware of potential issues and what to expect from them.

[RenegadeXR]

Originally Posted by joeyofblades;9117158I've actually made the resolve based on this and my Technostalgia issues to [b

never[/b] buy aftermarket tail lights for a car ever again... Stock bulbs are easy to work with and reliable.

^ This.

The original bulb is just a conventional incandescent bulb. If these do burn out, it's a generic part and you can swap it in 5 minutes, no problem. No need to touch the lamp housing itself, just turn the connector, pop out the bulb, and you're done.

These technostalgia lamps re-purpose that simple bulb connector as means of inputting electrical signals into a complex circuit board housed in the lamp housing itself. Tug on that connection even slightly, and tons of problems and erratic behavior can be seen. There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on in these lamps -- remember, all they take is a pulse signal from the turn signal and they manage to create a swiping effect, rapid fire effect, etc. All that stuff has individual chips taking that simple pulse as an input and doing some pretty complex stuff timing-wise to coordinate the illumination patterns of dozens of LEDs.

So yeah, you're basically asking for trouble. If it came from the factory this way, the design would have been way better. This is shoe-horning a lot of technology into something that's meant to be simple.

If and when my lamps finally have just one burnt out LED, all 4 are worthless. Lots of points of failure. :P

Will swap these out for the stock lamps + an oracle afterburner. I might install one of the cheaper sequential timers they sell that plug directly into the tail lamp harness too so I can *sort of* have them behave like the technostalgia lamps.

[serows1]

I've had the Technostalgia tail lights for a couple of years now and I've always had an intermittent problem with the right outboard light hyper flashing or the right side of the lights will not work at all. It usually acts up after I take her out of storage in the spring then after driving her a day or so it only acts up once in a while during the rest of the year.

I've had very limited success contacting Technastalgia via email but I've never made it far enough to ask about sending it back for service and usually give up around this time of the year because of how infrequent it was a problem. But this year it seems to be getting more frequent so I'll have to R&R the tail light to check the connectors then start looking for buying a used set as a back up because I really like them.

Paul

[joeyofblades]

Originally Posted by serows1

I've had the Technostalgia tail lights for a couple of years now and I've always had an intermittent problem with the right outboard light hyper flashing or the right side of the lights will not work at all.

Paul, try some di-electric grease on the connectors. It helps sketchy connectors out and I bathed the main connector in it on each light (the socket where the bulb would usually go with the prongs).

[sangerbanger58]

Anyone have a pic of they way you put the new resonators on?