A Mini’s Infotainment System And The Joys Of Aftermarket Automotive Components

Although [Arkandas] disclaims any curiosity in being a ‘automotive man’, that is considerably ironic in gentle of the sheer quantity of modding he has carried out on a variety of automobiles through the years, a latest misadventure involving a BMW Mini F56’s infotainment system substitute and a few gentle ECU reprogramming included. What occurred precisely is covered in a detailed breakdown in a weblog submit.

One of the elements that [Arkandas] disliked about this automotive was its iDrive infotainment system, itself a stripped-down model of the full-fat infotainment system in ‘actual’ BMW automobiles, with a small display screen and awkward UX. The concept was to switch this with a extra full-featured fashionable system.

Since the infotainment system does hook into the automotive’s CAN buses and different methods it must be appropriate, in fact. This took some analysis earlier than finally a flowery €700 aftermarket substitute was ordered from a Chinese vendor.

Long story brief, the gadget was principally appropriate except for a connector wired wrongly and creating a brief. This was mounted, however then the loosely fitted show toppled off throughout a take a look at drive and broke, so a substitute display screen was ordered. This display screen arrived with out requisite manufacturing unit programming, so [Arkandas] launched into an extended reverse-engineering session.

Before he was capable of extract firmware from the damaged show and flash it onto the brand new show he was supplied a brand-new substitute for the entire gadget, which he accepted in return for sending the outdated unit again. Although this nonetheless left him with a variety of questions, a minimum of the brand new infotainment seems to be fairly spiffy.

The worst half about the entire expertise was simply how a lot ready and agonizing over poor after-sale assist was concerned, together with all of the issues that may go improper and switch a enjoyable afternoon of becoming shiny new elements right into a months-long ordeal. Since fashionable automobiles are mainly only a stack of computer systems on wheels, this ensures that even ‘not automotive guys’ will probably be doing much more of such enjoyable automotive modding.