heinzboehmer's 2012 Alpine White 128i

[heinzboehmer]

Okay so I've lived with the Induktiv wireless charger for a while now and it's fine. All my previous complaints are still valid, but in steady state driving it does do its job. Fortunately, it only makes that high pitched noise for ~30s after starting the car, but the slippery surface + 1 coil combo does mean that any lateral acceleration will move my phone around and make it stop charging.

It turns out that the E82 cubby/tray thing where the charger goes is pretty cheap, so I bought one and 3D scanned it alongside the 996 calipers on the M3. Here's the result:



Will be designing my own version of this product that fits better and charges my phone at a more acceptable rate. I'll also make sure to contour the top of it so that I can put the stock rubber mat over it to keep it looking as factory as possible.

[heinzboehmer]

Was up in the mountains last weekend, so got the car prepped for that. First up, a quick filter change.

Engine one was due and cabin one was nasty. Not entirely sure why I didn't swap these out when I bought the car. Think I just forgot to order them then...





Then I re-aimed the headlights in an attempt to make the (potentially snowy) drive with the sun down a little less sketchy.

Before:



After:



Driver's side was the one that was most out of alignment, but honestly it did not make a huge difference. I think it's time to start looking into upgrades for this thing. Driving at night with the halogens really sucks.

And here's the car wearing its winter clothes:



Unfortunately no snow on the roads during the entire weekend I was there, but it still made for an awesome roadtrip car.

[heinzboehmer]

Actually, I just remembered that I did start designing a custom wireless charger right after I bought the car. It was designed as a two part 3D printed enclosure that sandwiched a magsafe charging puck within it. I was going to have it clip into the cubby using the stock mounting holes and shape the top of it to accommodate the stock rubber mat, which I like the look of. Was also going to tap into power using some nice TE connectors. Radio/nav were the obvious high-power sources, but I didn't really get that far into it to make a decision. Here's the (very much unfinished) design:




Stopped working on it for a couple reasons. First, the magsafe pucks are super thick, so this thing was getting chunky fast. Also, I realized the magsafe puck only charged my phone at ~3.5W with nothing in between them and struggled substantially to charge it with the rubber mat in between.

Maybe I should revisit this idea using the same wireless charging board I installed in the M3...

[heinzboehmer]

Having wireless Android Auto/CarPlay in this car has been awesome. However, it does quickly kill the connected phone's battery life on longer trips, so I decided I needed to install a wireless charger. For once, I decided that I shouldn't overcomplicate things and should just buy an off the shelf solution, so I went and got an E82 specific Induktiv wireless charger.

To be honest, I'm kind of disappointed with it, but I'll talk more about that later. First, the install.

Some minor disassembly and zip tie guidance was all it took. Only used a plastic pry tool for the whole process.

Started by poking a zip tie through the locating hole for the rubber mat in the center console cubby. Then taped the power lead coming off the charger to it and pulled it through:



I then routed the power wire from the back of the center console to the front. I ran it alongside (and underneath) the BMW factory wiring, to make sure it didn't interfere with any moving parts like the shifter and handbrake. Wireless charger itself gets secured to the cubby via two adhesive velcro squares:





And finally plugged it in to the cigarette lighter socket:



Okay now onto why I'm disappointed. Mostly petty things to be honest, but for some reason I expected more of this thing. Here's a quick review:

The good:

• Charges my phone at ~6W, which is on par with the charger I installed in the M3
• Quality on the injection molded ABS case is pretty good and matches well with the interior

The bad:

• Charges my phone at ~6W and not the advertised 15W
• I don't like the design on top and wish it were just flat. Would make it more streamlined and more efficient
• The quality of everything (besides the case) is not great
  • Wiring looks like whatever would show up at your door if you type "red black wire pair" into Amazon and chose the sponsored result
  • Connectors are clearly the cheapest things they could find
• The mounting "solution" is two small squares of velcro that don't seem to hold it in place all that well. I'm expecting this thing to rattle eventually. I wish they had spent more time and had it clip in to the existing (!) mounting holes in the cubby
• It doesn't really fit well inside the cubby? Sure, the geometry of it isn't straightforward, but come on we're supposed to be living in the future! An iPhone could get you a 3D scan that's good enough to design a product that fits snugly in the space
• I really dislike the spade wire tap thing. Feels cheap and prone to falling off and shorting. There's a million electrical modules in the center console, why not find one with an appropriate current rating and use the corresponding TE connectors to tap into it?
• There is clearly only one coil inside this thing. If the phone isn't centered on the charger, it won't charge. I expect to be needing to reposition my phone often while driving as the surface is fairly slippery
• And finally the worst one of them all: it makes a horrendous high pitched noise when charging Hopefully it won't be audible with the engine running, but I'm not too optimistic

I'm not sure what I expected from a Status Gruppe product, but yeah this thing isn't great. I'll give it a week or so, but I'm mentally preparing myself to rip it out and design something of my own. Sigh. Should have overcomplicated things from the start.

[heinzboehmer]

That 1er life… So glad to see it here

Nice! The E82 chassis is so good. I find myself liking it more the more I drive it.

Just need for the auto transmission to blow up so I have an excuse to swap a manual in

[AntRyv]

That 1er life… So glad to see it here

[heinzboehmer]

So, turns out that if you just throw a bunch of wires on top of the headliner, they'll start making noise. Who would have known?

Anyway, finally grew tired of that, so I lowered the headliner and secured all the wires using a few of those adhesive backed zip tie mounts.

Noisy:



Not noisy:



Unfortunately, I didn't make some of the wires long enough to go around the perimeter of the roof, so I had to run them diagonally across. Even though it's not ideal, they are clear of the airbags and don't seem to be making noise against the headliner, so I'm happy.

Also took the opportunity to swap my DIY ultrasonic sensor housing bracket for one that I grabbed off of an E90 at the junkyard:



Turns out the E90 bracket is slightly different. The metal frame is practically identical, but the black plastic part that attached the headliner to the roof with velcro is a completely different shape. For now, I just zip tied it up, but I'll grab the E82 bracket whenever I'm at a junkyard with one present.

[heinzboehmer]

Swapped engine mounts and transmission mounts as I could feel a very slight vibration at idle. No pics, but it basically the same as the E46. Support engine from up top, drop subframe slightly, swap mounts. Same for transmission except that one got supported by a jack from underneath.

I also replaced the e torx bolts holding the engine mount brackets to the engine. Read online that those apparently shear in half after some miles, so just bought new ones. Bought enough to replace both sides, but ended up doing just the passenger's side (those are the ones prone to failure anyway), as the bolts on the driver's side were extremely hard to get to without removing intake components. This was way harder to do than either of the mounts. Suuper limited access and a 25Nm + 105 deg torque spec with about 30 deg of space to swing the ratchet. Got it done in the end though.

Next up came spark plugs. Old ones were the correct ones and didn't look insanely bad, but were definitely due:



Both cars being worked on:



Also, noticed that BMW calls the plastic engine cover something like "acoustic cover" in TIS. Part doesn't have any sort of sound deadening underneath, so I thought it was a bit weird until I started the car up with the cover removed. Wow, those injectors are basically as loud as the M3 ones! Guess that cover does quiet them down quite well.

[heinzboehmer]

Picked up a mirror with homelink, compass and the stubby grey clown nose. Car came with a completely manual mirror, not even auto dimming. BMW sells a retrofit kit for this, so I got that too, but in retrospect, I should have just made it myself. Ended up just using like 5 wires from the kit and still running a coupe more of my own, oh well.

Harness ran through the grommet and plugged into the appropriate connectors on both sides. I just followed the mirror wiring diagram on TIS to know where to plug these in (BMW E82 128i Coupe/Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description/Body/Mirrors/Interior rear-view mirror, compass, garage door opener/):



The BMW retrofit harness has you tap into a ground to add another ground wire. I didn't want to do that, so instead I just wired the ground into my little breakout board. The harness also does not come with the constant power wire for the LED, so that too got wired to the board. I added a connector for the ground and power wires for easy removal/service:




Last wire to run was the signal wire for the LED. That one just went straight from the FZD to the mirror, so no pics of that.

And done:



LED works too:

[heinzboehmer]

Tensioner, idler and belt done. Looking much better:

[heinzboehmer]

Yeah I've been doing it that way on the E46 for a couple years now and it's been totally fine. Don't really expect the fluid on this car to be too bad either.

[tlow98]

Love it! I did the power steering the lazy way in my e91, too. It looked pretty new even at 80k miles.

[heinzboehmer]

Grabbed some tools from tlow98 yesterday and we did a quick walkaround the car. He noticed the engine is getting ready to eat the accessory belt:



Still have some parts are in the garage that I haven't installed, so I guess I gotta plan for a work day on this car soon. M3 is almost done, so should be able to get the following done in the next couple weeks:

• Swap tensioner
• Swap idler
• Swap belt
• Swap spark plugs
• Swap power steering fluid

PS fluid will be done the lazy way. Siphon out everything in the reservoir and refill, then cycle fluid through system. Do this a few times to get mostly new fluid in there. After that, I'll just siphon and refill every oil change.

[MathewM3]

It's pretty good. Took a bit of messing around to get it set up, but it's pretty reliable now that that's done. Basically just boots straight to carplay/android auto when you turn the car on, so their software is not something I interact with too frequently. Only issue I have with it is that sometimes when going into reverse, the backup camera feed will not show up and the device will just show a black screen. Haven't been able to reproduce it frequently or reliably enough to do much debugging though.

Audio quality is fine. Device outputs sound through a regular 3.5mm plug that plugs into the aux jack. Audio quality sounds about the same through the unit as it does with my phone just going straight to the aux jack.

Thanks, I am probably going with this set up on my 2016 M4.

[heinzboehmer]

It's pretty good. Took a bit of messing around to get it set up, but it's pretty reliable now that that's done. Basically just boots straight to carplay/android auto when you turn the car on, so their software is not something I interact with too frequently. Only issue I have with it is that sometimes when going into reverse, the backup camera feed will not show up and the device will just show a black screen. Haven't been able to reproduce it frequently or reliably enough to do much debugging though.

Audio quality is fine. Device outputs sound through a regular 3.5mm plug that plugs into the aux jack. Audio quality sounds about the same through the unit as it does with my phone just going straight to the aux jack.