Although [Arkandas] disclaims any interest in being a ‘car guy’, this is somewhat ironic in light of the sheer amount of modding he has performed on a range of cars over the years, a recent misadventure involving a BMW Mini F56’s infotainment system replacement and some light ECU reprogramming included. What happened exactly is covered in a detailed breakdown in a blog post.
One of the aspects that [Arkandas] disliked about this car was its iDrive infotainment system, itself a stripped-down version of the full-fat infotainment system in ‘real’ BMW cars, with a small screen and awkward UX. The idea was to replace this with a more full-featured modern system.
Since the infotainment system does hook into the car’s CAN buses and other systems it has to be compatible, of course. This took some research before ultimately a fancy €700 aftermarket replacement was ordered from a Chinese seller.
Long story short, the device was mostly compatible aside from a connector wired wrongly and creating a short. This was fixed, but then the loosely fitted display toppled off during a test drive and broke, so a replacement screen was ordered. This screen arrived without requisite factory programming, so [Arkandas] embarked on a long reverse-engineering session.
Before he was able to extract firmware from the broken display and flash it onto the new display he was offered a brand-new replacement for the whole device, which he accepted in return for sending the old unit back. Although this still left him with a range of questions, at least the new infotainment looks pretty spiffy.
The worst part about the whole experience was just how much waiting and agonizing over poor after-sale support was involved, along with all the things that can go wrong and turn a fun afternoon of fitting shiny new parts into a months-long ordeal. Since modern cars are basically just a stack of computers on wheels, this ensures that even ‘not car guys’ will be doing a lot more of such fun car modding.
This is like removing a cheap drop ceiling and finding out that there’s an ornate embossed tin ceiling from the 1920s hidden behind it
really tired of people replacing buttons with weird touchscreens. is this really a hack? I enjoyed more the youtuber’s video when he tried to replicate era specific buttons facia for his newer “touchscreen” head unit.
One of the things I like about this hack is that it kept a bunch of the physical buttons.
Yes, please, let’s add more shit to distract the driver…. smh ..
I have a 2020 Mini Cooper Electric SE3 (top trim level). It’s always running CarPlay, so the infotainment system matters little, just the screen.
I did a similar replacement with a vauxhall meriva b. It had a two line dot matrix display. Replaced it with an aftermarked android auto one, which is connected to the can bus. This way all the previous buttons and more importantly all previusly “dud” buttons, which were installed but did nothing could be configured for it. It added a touchscreen, and not decreased but increased the usable number of physical buttons.
Also a big shoutout to the fellow crawler ;)
I’m waiting for someone to do somewhat of the opposite, rip out as much of the computers as possible and bring a modern car back to being, foot, pedal, engine, wheels, road. No doubt a little more tricky than would first appear, considering pretty much every car produced within the last decade won’t even turn over the engine without first negotiating with the emu.
How is that a bad thing? In 1990s (and partly even into early 2000s) any brainlet with a pair of pliers could break a window, short three wires together and steal your car. Before you woke up in the morning it would already be some 300 km away, being stripped into parts. It was a huge issue and people installed all sorts of aftermarket alarms, blockades, hidden ignition switches etc.
When ECUs with immo became standard, theft of ordinary, cheap cars mostly stopped (even if some models remained vulnerable). If you have skills, knowledge and equipment to bypass ECU+immo+alarm combo in a hurry, you won’t use those to steal some random KIA worth maybe $500 in parts and risk 5 years in prison if caught.
I can’t be the only one who thinks the minimalist Tesla interior design would look great with a circular analog cluster replacing the touch screen in the center of the dash, dominated by a big speedometer, like a 1940s Ford dash.
Ok, maybe I am the only one.
Usually its a dedicated pin on LCD ribbon or a NC footprint on TCON, shorted/pulled right way makes it ignore input and blink test pattern. This way LCDs can be tested for bad pixels without connecting external active devices.
Its possible dude got send unit assembled from rejected parts.
As someone who sometimes spends time outside of a car, I find it a shame that people want to disable auto start-stop. The reason there is no easy way to disable it is because it has a meaningful effect on air quality when sitting in traffic. Sorry if that’s annoying for you.