bdbake01

Hooks those up to an arduino, have them slowly pulsing ala Iron Man arc reactor style, but subtle. Cool light show for a cruise in. Add a mic and have the truck react "angrily" when someone speaks bad about it. Lights turn red brighten up. Add a motion sensor and make it turn sad (green?) when people walk away.

Are the Caddy covers the only covers which fit?

Please don't take my comments to suggest this. I have a Sierra SLT with the LED DRL's. Not sure if the same scenario plays out on the silvy's.

BOW3 = DDM Tuning's "Error Eliminators"

If that's all you saw, I'd ask that you read it again carefully. My truck didn't run for the ~10 minutes it took me to diagnose the problem was the BOW3's. I think I pointed out that I've driven the truck for >2,000 miles since which pretty well implies that it runs. I'm not gonna push it that far, the thing is heavy. I didn't mean to imply that you're crazy, we're all probably a little nuts for paying what we did in the first place for the trucks themselves. But if someone is on the fence about paying the $$$ for Morimotos for fear that the DDM kit is crap, well I don't agree with that at all. IMHO, the quality is more than reasonable for the cost. Would I expect better quality for double (or more) price? Well yeah, but I think that's inline with anyone's expectations. I didn't mean to butthurt anyone on their choices. If you have an expensive kit, you like it, and the cost somehow makes you feel better, then rock it and love every minute of it. I'd rather spend my extra cash on something else. A nice steak. A set of exhaust tips. Heck I dunno, a beer or something. Essentially I don't like to overpay. As for lights being important, sure they are! Which is why I have my original halogens in nice little cases wrapped up in a cloth in my toolbox. Should I ever have a problem, it might take me 10 minutes in the rain on the side of the road in the middle of the night to swap them back in. Now, you can say this is because I'm concerned that my cheap ass HID's might give out on me. And you'd be 100% correct. I was also concerned about my factory halogens giving out on me, which is why I had a spare bulb even before the HID's. It's also why I carry a spare tire and a spare fan belt. Because you just can't trust Goodyear.

Well, it was a $50k truck. But that aside, if I ripped out every investment I've ever made the first time there was a minor bump in the road, I wouldn't be driving a $50k (domestically assembled btw) pickup. I'd be driving a $10k foreign designed and assembled Kia. To each his own, but I ripped out the $15 worth of parts that didn't want to play nice w/ my truck. Truck and lights now work fine, and I posted my findings here for others to learn from. As for the unsupported bit, I was told that it wasn't needed for my vehicle from their support team. I went against the recommendation and installed anyways. Seems if I had listened to their advice, I'd have been fine in the first place. But I do seem to learn well from my mistakes.

Good idea, and I will double check, but don't see how. BOW's were I stalled under top radiator support, last thing to go back on. Air box was already back in its spot. All I did to remove was take off rad cover, unplug, plug ballasts back in, put cover back on. Never touched air box.

Got the DDM tuning, 55 watt, 5K installed. Need to play with the bulbs/aiming a bit, but overall reasonably pleased. A HUGE improvement over stock...but that, of course, isn't saying much. I'll admit I'm not as impressed with the brightness as I was expecting. Extremely glad I didn't go 35W. FYI for anyone who doesn't think this is a quality kit...you really should get out more. Build quality is more than reasonable for the cost. Frankly, I'm not interested in paying 100% more for 10% more quality. But that's me, to each his own. Received mid august, got a 40A relay for those tracking such things. Here's one for you. I decided to get the DDM "Error Eliminators" as I didn't want to splice/solder a cap inline and the BOW3 has nice, factory connectors. I never could get DDM to admit anything more than "Your truck doesn't need the BOW3's, but they won't hurt" and "Yes, there is a cap in the BOW3's". Neither statements really told me what I wanted to know, but it's worth a try. I wired everything up, hid most stuff under the radiator support cap, LOTS of room in there. Very nice. Put key in ignition, turned on truck, turned on lights and.........!!!!!! Nothing. Huh. That's interesting. Well maybe more than nothing, I THINK I saw one of the lights blink once. Maybe. Either way, lights no workie. Grab the Fluke, check everything, I'm good. Ok, try again. Not even a blink. Can't hear relay. Ok, sounds crazy but let's start truck. Start truck, cranks for a while but does start. Go around front to begin checking things (headlights on manual at this point), truck dies. TRUCK. DIES. WTF??? Start it again. Fires right up. 3 seconds later...truck dies. Try again, lights blink & truck starts, 3 seconds later dies. No errors, codes, etc. Weird. Remove BOW3's figuring that's the only "unknown" component in this. Lights fire right up, truck fires right up, >2,000 miles later and many nights, everything works perfectly. No BOW3's, no caps. No, the BOW3's didn't blow up. I can't explain this series of events.

Do you run through burning houses in the evenings as a hobby or something??? Wow

Ok, lemme see if I can do this. The "relay" kits include a relay, which is essentially an electrically operated switch. The old, small wires which used to power your halogen lights act as the input to this relay, similar to your hand flipping a wall switch, to turn it on. The relay, in turn, send nice, clean, no canbus power directly from the batter, through the relay, to your HID ballasts. The ballasts like this. The caps are usually necessary to keep the old bulb single that turns on the relay nice, clean, and canbus free so the relay doesn't chatter. Without it, it's kinda like the wall switch analogy except you've got a really shaky arm and you don't just flip the switch on, but you jiggle it (just a little bit, c'mon now jiggle it...) on and off very quickly making the lights flicker. Now, you can, as our friend here has done, forget the relays and just power the ballasts directly from the old bulb harness so when the truck decides to turn on the lights, it actually just sends power to the ballasts instead of the bulbs, and the ballasts in turn power the HID bulbs. This can work too, but it isn't as desirable as you still have to use the caps to get the canbus out so the ballasts don't freak out, and the wires are small, truck may think the buls are out without load, etc. etc. This helpful at all?

He doesn't have the relays. He's driving the ballasts directly with his old bulb feed. So, he doesn't have anything to ground. And the ground isn't optional with the HID relay harness. It won't work without a solid ground, so the fact that he has lights at all implies that he doesn't have relays and therefore, doesn't need a seperate ground. Or +12V feed for that matter.

Sorry Trying to keep it simple, but it's a somewhat complex topic. I think SLT's or others w/ LED DRL are fine with just the cap, as are the Silvy's. In all cases I'd recommend the HID relay kit.

Close, but you're kinda thinking in reverse here. The truck's computer (the BCM I believe) is sending out the CANbus signal, and it's also measuring the DC current in the lighting loops to monitor bulb function. The CANbus eliminators use a capacitor to bypass the CANbus signal around the HID system that we add on so that this "noisy" signal doesn't bother the relays or ballasts. The cap doesn't provide any load, it just gives the CANbus signal an alternate path which it can take. The load has to be restored in some way to keep the measured DC load above whatever threshold the BCM uses to decide that a bulb is out, I'm guessing somewhere in the >30 watt range per bulb. This seems a bit high for a simple resistor, so I'm not sure what the CANbus eliminators employ. It could be a resistor and they just run a bit hot. I dunno. I really want to take one apart. Hey, if anybody has a BOW3 or other "CANbus eliminator" that you don't care about, or has failed, crack that puppy open and take pics!

Seems GM's implementation is slightly different between different models. One that that's definitely different is on the LED DRL equipped trucks, they don't use PWM to dim the headlights for DRL, and that's a good thing when it comes to getting HID's to work. This is one reason which may explain why some have XYZ and it works while others don't.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it! If you don't have any flickering lights, unreliable operation, or buzzing relays, consider yourself either talented or lucky and be happy!

As I've never taken a CANbus kit apart, some of this is speculation on my part so please forgive me if it's not 100% accurate. The cap will bypass the AC CANbus signal. It kinda acts like a short for the AC, and that's it. It doesn't actually take any current (watts), so it presents no load to the vehicle like a halogen bulb does. I think the CANbus kits have the same capacitor installed in the same manner as you would yourself inside that little box. In addition, they seem to have some load source, such as a simple resistor, to provide a dummy load to the vehicle so it "looks" like a light bulb to the truck and doesn't throw any alarms. Little background here, the truck is looking for a certain magnitude of load, ie watts, to know that the headlights are working. If this suddenly drops in half, well then one of your lights is blown, that simple. But if you put in a relay harness, or directly connect a set of HID ballasts, then the measured load on the truck is waaaaay less than the original 110 watts from two halogen bulbs. The reistor/load/etc. in the CANbus eliminators puts this load back so the truck *thinks* the bulbs are still there and working. A capacitor doesn't do this.

CANbus is a device level communications protocol often implemented in vehicles and other machinery to allow low-ish speed communication between numerous devices using the same two wires used to also carry power. What u get is DC with a high frequency AC signal superimposed over the top. Most CANbus devices have a capacitor (which blocks DC and passes AC) inside to separate power and signal into two lines inside the device. In the case of our trucks, it allows communication between different engine and body sensors with only two wires. MUCH better diagnostics while saving weight and expense. CANbus eliminators have a cap and (most likely) a resistor to essentially bypass the AC around our HID's and fake a halogen-like load. This keeps the ballasts from flipping out over the AC (which they don't like) and keeps the truck happy because it still sees a bulb load thinking everything's ok. A relay harness is entirely different as it takes the truck's CANbus loaded signal going to the original Bulbs as the input to turn the relay itself on, which in turn sends nice, clean, battery DC straight to the ballasts directly from the battery. If u have an original CANbus or low PWM (pulse width modulated) DRL bulb signal trying to turn on this relay, well it can chatter/pulse and generally get all upset like then HID ballasts do. So having a relay harness doesn't preclude the need for a cap or CANbus eliminator device.

It's an easy install. The only "non plug n play" items are you do need to drill holes in the back of the headlight housing covers for the wires, you'll need to find a +12V source and a decent ground location if you use the HID relay harness (and I recommend you do). I wouldn't consider these items plug n play, but they are also very, very easy. A novice should have no difficulty whatsoever.

Is the "BOW3" option @ DDM just a set of caps with a factory harness so no splicing? I can't find much info on it.

Read all 25 pages. Haven't seen a definitive verdict on whether or not a 55w HID kit will fry a GMC SLT housing or not. Any opinions or evidence one way or the other? Obviously I'm thinking "More light = better", but not to the extent that it melts the uber expensive housings.

Just find the switched lead which folds the mirrors and parallel a relay. Just find the switched lead which folds the mirrors and parallel a relay.

Well if you haven't tried holding it down for several minutes??? I'm guessing it won't, but it may. Could do it with a single pole, double throw switch. Hot lead goes to lights, the switched leads go to BCM and an alternate 12v source. In position 1, factory. Position 2, hot all the time.

it's possible that a maintained switch set up in this manner, i.e. holding a constant low/grnd on the BCM, would maintain them on indefinitely. Not sure, but it might.

Don't forget to charge it in some manner regularly.

Think about it like this. The underbody is all kinda chopped up with tons of stuff to present drag, or resistance to the flow of air. Any air that gets under there will try to slow down the truck. If you can divert this up or over, then the top and/or sides of the truck are waaaaay more slippery and will, therefore, reduce drag. This is why sports car designers want the body as low as possible and the underbelly to be as smooth as possible.