heinzboehmer's 2012 Alpine White 128i

[heinzboehmer]

Managed to get the TPMS disabled and the FTM enabled today.

First thing I did was remove the TPMS module. It's underneath the car and very much feels like an afterthought:



It's also extremely light and hollow feeling. So much so that it makes me think that it's just the antenna, even though TIS says this is all there is. I followed the wires leading to it, but gave up once they got lost in the wheel well. Would be nice to remove everything, but it's the daily and I don't need to be stripping it to make a racecar, so whatever.

Then came the coding. There's a bunch of different info out there on how to do it, but this is what worked on my car:

• Removed $2VB from the VA
• FA_WRITE to CAS and NFRM
• Default coded DSC, CIC and CAS

iDrive wasn't super happy after the coding:



Clicking reset made it change its mind:



Seemed like everything was working well, but I wanted to make sure it actually did what it was supposed to do. I let out air from the front right tire until it was at 20 psi and drove the car around. Eventually I got this:




It also showed a warning on the dash that's pretty hard to ignore. Very useful since the iDrive screen is showing carplay/android auto most of the time now:



I actually struggled a lot to get the system to react to the low tire. Had to air back up and reset multiple times. This system seems a lot less sensitive than the E46 one, but whatever, it seems to work.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this. Less complexity, less things to fail and less cost when swapping wheels

[heinzboehmer]

Recalibrating the steering angle sensor now. Good thought.

Pressures look good and it did it to me on the Richmond bridge today with a cross wind. It’s probably the steering angle sensor, let’s hope at least.

edit: scratch that, steering angle sensor was straight already :/

Hmm, not sure what else could be causing it. Maybe the different sized wheel + tires on the non-M body are throwing the system off? Supposedly the system should learn the diameter of each tire when it's reset, but I'm not sure how it actually works. Very much a black box.

[Bry5on]

Recalibrating the steering angle sensor now. Good thought.

Pressures look good and it did it to me on the Richmond bridge today with a cross wind. It’s probably the steering angle sensor, let’s hope at least.

edit: scratch that, steering angle sensor was straight already :/

[Slideways]

Didn’t know you could enable TPMS by wheel speed on those cars. Cool.

My TPMS triggers itself on the same stretch of shitty road on 880 north every. time. on my commute 2x/ week to/from Sunnyvale. My only explanation is that the road quality is SO bad that my rear wheels under torque are spinning more than the front wheels.

Could it be one of the sensors or the wiring? Maybe that road is transmitting something physically to the sensor/wiring. Other than that, wheels or tires.

[heinzboehmer]

Yep! Apparently only US cars got the sensor based TPMS system. Other markets stuck with the regular wheel speed sensor one.

And that's weird. The light in my M3 has only ever come on when a tire was actually low. The system monitors wheel speed differences between the two tires of each axle, so different speeds between front and rear shouldn't make it come on.

Is your steering angle sensor well calibrated? Only thing I can think of is that the car is turning a bit and the system thinks it's not because the sensor is slightly off.

[Bry5on]

Didn’t know you could enable TPMS by wheel speed on those cars. Cool.

My TPMS triggers itself on the same stretch of shitty road on 880 north every. time. on my commute 2x/ week to/from Sunnyvale. My only explanation is that the road quality is SO bad that my rear wheels under torque are spinning more than the front wheels.

[heinzboehmer]

Did some small things.

Windshield was getting a bunch of streaks when using the wipers, so I cleaned it up with some 0000 steel wool and then washed it. Did a quick coat of wax on it too to help the rain glide off.

Streak:



No streak:



Headlights were looking pretty tired, so I polished those up quickly:






They're not perfect, but this is about as much as I was willing to go. The light output of the halogens is pretty terrible, so I'm considering one of those LED retrofit kits. Still need to look more into it because I'm not fully convinced that the retrofit kit won't blind everyone else on the road. Gonna need to see if I can find one to check out in person.

Anyway, point is that the headlights might get worked on again, so just did a super quick polish. Also, the car desperately needs a thorough wash. Will get to that after the car has finished its snow duties.

After that I finished up the dashcam install. Got the PCB soldered up and made it look niceish:




Went into the car without any issues. Since there's no sunroof, there's tons of space up in the headliner, so tucking it out of the way was super easy.



I also finished up the aux adapter so that the carplay module cable could be run fully inside the center console:





No more visible wires . Center console is all taken apart cause the trim was pretty destroyed. More on that later.

And finally I installed the same VW grocery bag holders that I have on the M3.

Just like before, I removed the locating dowel things to have them sit flush against the trunk panels:



And installed:




Love these things, I use them a ton on the M3. They'll be even more useful on the daily.

Next up is disabling the US market TPMS system and enabling the MK60 wheel speed based flat tire monitor (just like what's on the E46). I was too cheap to buy TPMS sensors for my snow wheels and the bonging every time I get in the car is driving me crazy.

[heinzboehmer]

What did you use for hub clean-up? I got one of those drill brush attachments, it's kind of plastic-y feeling and I don't think it does a fantastic job.

Nothing fancy. Just a wire wheel on a drill and some brake cleaner. After that I added a thin film of WD-40 just to keep water away. Sprayed it on a rag first, not directly on the hub.

[Seano666]

What did you use for hub clean-up? I got one of those drill brush attachments, it's kind of plastic-y feeling and I don't think it does a fantastic job.

[heinzboehmer]

Ooh dashcam PCBs just arrived. Fit is great. Proud of my measurements.

[heinzboehmer]

Subscribed!!! Can't wait to watch this unfold! Love the Guage cluster update 🤠

Thanks! The gauge cluster made a huge difference. GF thinks it was stupid, but I hated driving that thing around with 0 temp gauges. Don't get too excited about this car though, probably won't be as interesting as the M3. Any mods to it will be mostly convenience type things. Well until I decide to E9x M3 swap it


Also, I fixed my transmission yesterday. It was shifting fine, but still making gurgling noises. I went back and read through TIS and realized I made another stupid mistake. I used this thread as a reference for doing the service: https://www.1addicts.com/forums/showthread.php?t=995991 . Just skimmed through it since I thought I mostly knew what I was doing. The one thing I didn't realize is that after filling the transmission back up cold, you're supposed to start the engine, get it up to temp and leave it running when you fill it back up to spec. I was getting it up to temp and then shutting the engine off. The thread doesn't ever say to turn it off, but for some reason I assumed that you needed to. TIS makes it super clear though:



Honestly feel like an idiot about this, but that's what I get for skimming stuff and being overly confident in my skills as a mechanic (especially when servicing a system that I've never worked on before). Oh well, another lesson learned. Not gonna make that mistake again.

Transmission took another 1.5 L when filled up correctly (yikes again) and the noises are now gone! Still no glitter, so think I managed to avoid killing it.


After that, I swapped on snow tires cause this car is going up to the slopes soon. Surprisingly, the hubs were extremely rusty. Car has been in CA all its life, so no idea how they got like this. Even the hubs on the M3 —which was driven through winters a good chunk of its life— looked nothing like these. They cleaned up well though.




Was dark when I finished, so didn't take any pics of the car on the style 45s, but it looks pretty terrible. I'll grab some pics of it in the snow. Fortunately these wheels will only be getting put on the car when going up to the mountains.

[Casa de Mesa]

Subscribed!!! Can't wait to watch this unfold! Love the Guage cluster update 🤠

[heinzboehmer]

Also gave this thing a fluid service this weekend. The car came with service records and it had been recently serviced at the dealer, so it wasn't a huge priority, but still wanted to do it to make sure everything was good.

Did oil, coolant, transmission fluid (+ filter and pan gasket) and RBF600. Didn't do the diff fluid because it was surprisingly expensive and the car is at 76k mi. Plus, I'm kinda okay with the diff failing, since that means I can replace it with an LSD

Nothing out of the ordinary with any of the fluids, but thought the before and after of the transmission pan cleaning was interesting enough to document:



I'm very unfamiliar with torque converter autos, but I think that amount of metal is normal/expected?

I did make a very stupid mistake though. Did the service at a friend's house and used his jack stands. He has a set of those aluminum torin jack stands and at first glance all four look exactly the same. However, it turns out he has two from one batch and two from another. Most of the dimensions are the same, with the exception of the height of the outer red cylinder.

When jacking up the car, I put the front up first at a height that seemed appropriate and then set the rear stands to have the same number of holes visible above the red part. I didn't realize this at the time, but because the jack stands are different, doing it this way meant that they ended up at different heights. This, in turn, meant the car was higher at the front and led me to underfill the transmission (by a lot).

I realized something was very wrong quite quickly on the test drive and immediately drove back to put it on the stands again. This is when I realized that I had set them to different heights and had underfilled the thing. Jacked it up correctly and I was able to put 2 more liters in before it started coming out the fill hole (yikes). Unfortunately, I did drive the car around when underfilled, so I circulated a good amount of air through the hydraulic passages. After filling up to the correct level, the car shifts fine, but I can hear some gurgling in first and second gear. I'm assuming that's just air trapped somewhere. Gonna need to mess around with INPA/DIS to bleed this stupid thing and then recheck the level.

Things would have been totally fine if this was a manual...

I did also drain a bit of fluid when I realized things were wrong and saw no glitter, so I think the internals are okay. Just gonna have to spend a bunch of time getting the air out because of my stupid mistake. Lesson learned though, not gonna trust my eyes to tell me that a car is level in the future.

[heinzboehmer]

Done a decent amount of stuff to this car recently.

First off was a Carplay/Android Auto module install. I ended up going with the BimmerTech unit, even though it was significantly more expensive than other options. I thought about getting one of the eBay units, but wanted something that would just work and that I didn't need to mess with too much.

Install was super straight forward, especially with the install videos they have on Youtube, but I did do a couple things differently. Instead of running the aux cable along the center console and plugging it into the aux jack, I ran it under stuff in the center console and out the hole where the aux jack panel sits:




I ordered a female connector that will plug into the harness connector for the aux jack. Once I have that, I'll remove the 3.5mm part from the cable and crimp some pins on to go into the female connector. With that, I'll be able to have everything hidden under the center console, instead of having a cable snaking up along the outside of the center console. I'll lose aux jack functionality, but who cares.

The other thing I did differently was the placement of the module. The instructions say to place it in front of the fusebox, which I did not like at all. If installed like that, access to the fuses is completely blocked unless you remove the module, which isn't trivial. Instead, I decided to just leave the module in the glovebox. Takes up a bit of space, but it's not a big deal. Plus, this way I have super easy access to it if needed and it doesn't block access to the fuses at all.

Wiring harness ran behind trims and cleaned up:



And installed:



Next, I removed the airbag warning stickers. Isopropyl and paper towels made this pretty easy:




Much better.

After that came the dashcam install. Turns out that there's some plugs in the dome light that have constant and switched 12V, which is great! Unfortunately, the female connector seems to be BMW specific, so I was unable to find it at the regular electronics distributors, so I ended up buying a used dome light panel and scavenged the connector from it. Then I designed a quick breakout board to use to tap into the wiring harness.

Surprisingly, the connector was not soldered on, just pressed in. Honestly, this made it a bit annoying to remove, but I got it off after some messing with it:



Here's a closeup of the pins, you can see the protrusions that dig into the PCB when pressed in:



Since the connector is proprietary, I wasn't able to find a datasheet for it either. This meant making a footprint for it off of my own measurements. Before getting the PCB made, I printed it out and checked that everything fit well:




Nice, got it correctly on the first try. Now I just need to wait for the PCB to arrive and then I can finish up the harness for the dashcam.

I also bought the BMW alarm system, but when I went to install it, I realize that the car isn't prewired for it. Turns out BMW stopped doing that in 2009ish, so that means I get to make my own harness for that as well, yay. Have ordered the connectors and will work on it soon. Doesn't look too hard really.

[heinzboehmer]

Something nice about driving a car that you don't have to care too much about, but is still clean and everything works.

Yep! Totally agree. It's very refreshing.


Also, quick update. Finished up the second key. Soldered the replacement battery on and glued the two halves of the key back together. Used 3M emblem and trim adhesive (mostly because I had some on hand) and some masking tape to hold it shut. Worked great.

Worn key on the left:





Pretty happy with how it turned out. Feels much nicer to use the brand new key than the worn one. Will have to see how the adhesive used holds up though.