E39 Touring Radio Weirdness

[kmashlan 0]

Hi everyone.  Looking for some help here is anyone has run across this before.

For background I have a 2000/9 E39 touring Japanese import.  I replaced the Nav with a MKIII and the radio with a BM24.  I coded the nav using NavCoder and It all seems to work OK (or did for maybe 6 months).  

What I get now is when starting the car, the orange light comes on and maybe 50% of the time no sound.  If I turn the radio off and back on it usually (not always) works.  However, sometimes the orange light comes on and the radio fires up right away.  Most of the time the orange light does not come back on and maybe 30-60 seconds later the radio comes to life.  If I have the screen on GPS it flicks to the radio screen when pushing the power, even when the orange light doesn't show up, so I know it has "recognised" the power on.  Then after the delay, the radio comes on.  Pushing any other buttons are also delayed - e.g. the tone will pop up maybe 30 seconds after it is pushed.  

I have a second BM24 and it behaves the same way.  I am thinking the amp?  Or maybe the Nav is doing something weird?  

This car to be fair feels strange though.  I had a modlight 3 in my e38 which worked no problem.  In this car it works, but prevents the car going to sleep so drains the battery.  Starting to think maybe something is spewing data onto the canbus network or similar???

 

Cheers

Ken

Edited June 6, 2023 by kmashlan

[Neal 544]

Most of the nav and internal lighting controls are using ibus for communication and your theory about activity on the bus is likely cause.

The bus is a very low speed serial asynchronous system that works in a party line style so each element will try transmitting and will back off if something else transmitting and try again.

With nav coder watch the activity on the bus and see if any device nodes are continuing transmitting. Also check for devices like aftermarket Bluetooth audio gateways as some of those can cause issues ( often a power reset will help ) . Also need to check that no one before your ownership has tapped it for a power source

If your getting corruption a way to check is via navcoder on one of the modules. Bluetooth module is ideal if you have one. You’ll see random characters rather than pairing PIN number.

The ibus wire colour is primary white with yellow.

 

 

 

 

[Neal 544]

How did you get on ?