Light 'er up

Because it's winter, I get about a fifteen minute window to work on the car before it is too dark to be useful.
A fact not helped by the missing interior globe. I picked up two old fashion incandescent globes to buy me some time and help me confirm the type before I replaced it with some LED ones.

You can see the yellow of the traditional incandescent globe which does offer a warm light, but not a great deal of it.
Also notice the effect of removing most of the tint from one of the rear windows.
On the second roof support visible in the above picture, I plan to install a proper LED cabin light, running off the axiliary battery like the one below. It's weird, because there are two tiny holes beside the existing lamp, that look to be the exact measurements of this light... which makes me suspect maybe I'm not the first person to need more light in there.

What is surprising is that the LED light above, puts out I would estimate 3-4 times more light than a single festoon style interior light... but uses only a quarter of the power.

So, that's the thinking with lighting so far, but the next cool project I'm considering is implementing an in-cab winch controller. This is a momentary switch, meaning you need to hold it to make it do something and then when you let go, it goes off again. This will be in addition to the external winch controller which I have nearly run over twice already. I was thinking about how I would implement an isolation switch to prevent accidental use, but really, it'll only work while the engine is running, so the risk is minimal.



I've not yet had a chance to figure out how the dual batteries are configured. I don't know if there is an isolator somewhere or if they are just hooked up in parallel. For most automatic isolators, you have the option of temporarily connecting the batteries together to facilitate starting if the main battery is low or for heavy loads such as electric winching (whoo hooo, no risk of flattening the battery with my winch).
Again, I'm choosing a momentary switch for this task so that we can't accidentally run the main battery flat by someone leaving the batteries linked. I also plan to use the indicator light as a diagnostic output of the state of the isolator which will be very bling.