Reverse Glow Gauges

I'm putting in a set of glow gauges I got off ebay in my 1999 F150. I can wire them up just fine to the parking lights so they get power when the lights go on, however the gauges come with a really stupid on/off switch so you have to manually turn the gauges lights on or off. The problem I'm having is that I don't know of a way to wire the 2 leads from the switch so that my gauges automatically come on with the rest of my lights. The switch is one where you press the button once to turn it on and the same button again to turn it off. It can be grounded for 1 second to turn it on or off but I don't know how to make that automatically happen. I can't just ground the wires from the switch either because they need to be grouned for the 1 second after the inverter has recieved power.

Hello, you can do this with a relay.



Just change 87 and 30 to the contacts for your switch, and power it ( 86 ) off from the same line you are getting your power from, in your case, the parking lights.

[quote]
The capacitor allows the coil of the relay to be energized until the capacitor stores a charge, thus de-energizing the coil. The resistor bleeds off the charge of the capacitor when positive voltage is removed from the other side of the coil. You can increase the output time by simply changing the value of the capacitor. This one will give you about a 1/2 second output.
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That looks similar to what I need but the switch isn't powered, it's just a switch that grounds itself I think.

Does anyone else have any clue on how to do this? There are 2 wires from the inverter connected to the momentary switch that came with it. Neither of these wires are positive as far as i know, they are just grounded. I just need a way to send momentary ground signal through the wires to make the gauges come on with the rest of my lights

when you figure this out let me know i have a 02 grand prix same situation

I just wired mine into a 99 grand am, I used the wiring harness for the gauge cluster to power mine, on mine it was an orange wire and a black with white stripe, power and ground respectively. I then wired the turn on to my fog lamps. Orange was the hot wire and purple was the the connection through and black with white stripe was ground. I plugged the positive into the orange wire and the other into the purple. So when my fogs go on then my gauges will light up as well.

I did the exact same thing with my s10, worked perfectly, used the "dead end" harness for the fog light switch since i didnt have a fog light switch, guages even dimmed with the dash lights.