Range Rover Sport LED Matrix

The Osram Smartrix technology

The Osram Smartrix technology provides for the use of high power LED groups, individually controllable and with variable brightness; this innovation will allow the headlights to "decide" which part of the road to illuminate and with what intensity, by turning on each LED separately and by controlling its power.
In this way the light beam will always be at maximum without dazzling the other drivers.

Our mission

Our customers owning a Range Rover Sport fell in love with the Facelift, to the point of wanting right away to "refresh" his Sport L494.
We immediately have started what has been the longest and most complex Reverse-Engineering work we have ever done.

The “old” headlights

Range Rover Sport is equipped with an intelligent on-board electronic system, which later has been implemented on many other cars; the headlights are not managed via positive and negative signals, but partially through data signals.
Basically, although low beam, high beam and turning indicators are switched on via +12v and negative, the remaining functions are permanently powered at 12v (even when the car is switched off) so that the control units inside the headlight can always "listen", but the actual ignition signal is sent via the on-board Lin Bus network through a digital data wire.
The headlights of the Range Rover Sport, therefore, are a full-fledged "computer" with its own intelligent "brain” able to capture, decode and process data from a single wire.

The Reverse-Engineering

From the beginning we understood that it wasn't going to be an easy work, but we did not imagine it would have been so complicated.
First of all, we built an interface board that, connected to the car, would have allowed us to "see" and record the data coming from the car, in order to save them on a computer; since on a single data line are intercepted the signals of the whole vehicle (e.g. air conditioning, doors position, speed, engine sensors...) it was necessary to identify the right data and find them into digital tables with millions of values.
We then measured the electrical consumption of each component so to be sure of how to behave to fix any failures.
Once this phase has been completed, we removed the connectors from the old headlights, in order to use them on the new ones.

The conversion

In order to make the new headlights compatible with the old electrical system, we first had to understand how it works and replicate its functioning in the lab without having a MY2018 car at disposal. We have completely opened and disassembled the headlights, freed each bundle of cables and disassembled every single component.
With clearly visible cables and tracks, it has been relatively easy to identify the masses and powering of the LEDs; we then generated the tune of fifteen pages of electrical diagrams and notes, managing to turn on every LED in the way expected by OSRAM engineers.

Low beams, dynamic turning indicators and DRL

The low beam of the Matrix LED headlights was simple to switch on: we just had to find the right connection points with the original control unit and generate the right signal to activate them. We used the same technique for all the other functions.

The high beam lights

Since the high beams are so complex and since we couldn't automatically control them as required by the 2018 version of Range Rover Sport, we had to study the control and power supply ECUs, intercept the connections and bypass them in order to supply them externally with the right currents. The new electronics we made was then fixed with precision in an empty space; we have also added some small (but very powerful) tangential fans for their cooling.

The configuration

In this phase it was necessary to have some computer programming knowledge: we developed a software that decodes the data coming from the old electrical system, understands what the car commands, generates a function and sends it to the correct cable with the right syntax. We then loaded this program into a micro-computer inserted into the new headlights and connected the Input and Output wires to it.

For example:

1. Reading of the incoming data
2. Searching the instructions for turning on the headlights
3. I found "Turn on right turning indicator" (language 2014)
4. I translate "Activate right turning indicator" (language 2018)
5. Sending translated data to the "right turning indicator" wire

The connection

With some small electrical adjustments, we connected about 40 wires to each headlight, replacing the new connector with the old one and matching all the cables to the relative functions.
After sealing the optical groups, we mounted everything on the car using the standard connectors and... Voilà! Everything is working!

The testing

To ensure the reliability of our electronics, we have subjected the boards to voltages or currents greater than necessary, leaving every component under stress for hours or days, controlling the temperature and verifying the stability of the output current.
The high beams, so delicate and complicated, were left turned on for 48 consecutive hours without ever recording temperatures above 60°.