Thread: 2003 BMW M3 Custom Dash / Overhead Console

All the photos are of windows. I switched to Linux a while back. It worked fine, but in my case took longer to start up and just was not quite as flexible, so I switched back to windows. If I were to do it all over again, I'd be using a Mac mini running OS X though. OS X power management is incredible.

KDB9000: I use debian pretty much exclusively. I could have spent a lot more time making it work like I really wanted, but I just didn't have the time to do it.. If I had a job developing carpc stuff full time, maybe But I just found windows to be a lot easier. The pic on the front page really is Windows. Unlike many poeple here, I don't like any frontends. They all take too much time to start up. I use seperate applications. You are looking at the windows desktop in that photo. It's kind of overexposed, but the start menu is there on the bottom left (XP Silver Theme) and there are four icons on the desktop (large icons, one click to open, lock desktop icon positions). I set the menubars and scrollbars to be large enough that I can hit them with the touchscreen and that's about it. I can use most windows apps without big problems. I might also point you toward's StarDock's Object Desktop. That has always really interested me as a possible frontend. You can basically replace the windows explorer with it and make little 'objects' that are scriptable with anything windows scripting host supports (VBScript, Javascript, Perl, even compiled C/C++) So you'd get a lot of flexibility with that.. again, I just did not ever have the time to check into it...

BMVEE: Oh sorry man I forgot you had asked about that.. E46 dash is pretty easy. You need a wide blade flathead (preferably) or maybe a thin chisel.. After you see how it works, you can pretty much use anything flat to do it the next time Start on the far side by the passenger door and put your screwdriver under the trim piece above the glove box. There is a pressure mounted aluminum peg that pushes into a retainer in the dash. The dash material is somewhat flexible, so you can get the screwdriver behind there. Once you feel the blade pressing up against the peg, kind of rotate it back and forth and ease the pin out of the hole. Once you have the first one out you can just go along the dash to the middle. There are three or so pins above the gove box and two that hold the middle trim piece in. Once the trim is out, you can easily see the screws that retain all of the other equipment.. radio, etc. The AC controls just snap in.. To get them out, take out the radio, put your hand behind the AC controls and just pull until they come out.

Also, don't worry if you damage any of the little aluminum pins or the orange retainers while you are pulling the trim out. They are only like 20 cents each from the dealer and they should keep them in stock. They break quite often.

Hey Gork, regarding the wiring harness and the SVEN4, will the sound automatically get routed to the subwoofer without having to do something specific? I'm using a laptop with a Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card, and the cord off of this has three output jacks: front, back, and sub. Since the SVEN4 only has 4 inputs (front left, front right, rear left, rear right), I only hooked up the front and rear connections from the Audigy. Will the sub get sound this way, maybe handled by the internal crossover?

Also, with the above setup, the sound isn't very loud, even at 100%. I cranked up the little screws on the SVEN4 thinking that they controlled the level for each channel, but it still isn't very loud. Any thoughts here?

One more thing (trying to get this done this weekend) - on the SVEN4, on the end that has the RCA cables, there's a black wire that's marked "ground", but in the instructions it seems to specify that it should be connected to a power source. I wonder if that's what's causing my lack of volume - Gork, what do you have this black wire connected to? Mine's not connected to anything at the moment, and I do get sound, just not the loudest sound.

Hark:

Yes; the factory system has its own crossover. If you configure your audigy for 4.0 speaker output it will work fine. If you configure it for 4.1 or 5.1, the audigy will itself do bass redirection and send the low frequencies to the sub channel, so be sure you are configured without that.

For the wiring question, the GND wire on the amp side of the sven 4 (the side you wired to the harness) needs to be connected to the GND on the harness (Chassis GND). The reason for this is that each speaker connection in the factory bmw is actually 3 wires (balanced audio) not 2 wires. The third wire is GND (common to all four speakers). While it's probalby not affecting your sound anyway since everything has the same GND reference, it is the proper way to wire it. If you are curious, they do this so they can run the audio over unshielded cable. Normal unbalanced audio is a signal wire and a GND reference wire, balanced audio is two signal wires out of phase with each other and a GND reference; thus any noise on the cabling can be accounted for easily. A lot of things use differential signaling for this purpose. USB does for its data lines. In the pro audio world, XLR connectors most often signify balanced audio as well. It really blows my mind why "high end" car audio is all so backwards - You would think especially with the poor power environment in a car that all the high end stuff would just automatically used balanced audio -- oh well!

For the volume issue... I have had several people tell me about this and I have finally found a workaround or two and a couple of ways you can improve the quality and volume with the factory system. I haven't verified any of this myself, peronally yet but I am doing some work on my install today and I may try it out here myself in a few hours and see if I can find anything.

1) The factory amp(s) perhaps have an electronic gain control that is adjusted by a serial control line off of the factory head unit. This is perhaps one of the purposes of the extra small plug that goes to the back of the factory HU. The messages may pass over I-Bus and, if so, it would be possible to control the amp gain with a computer, but I do not know this for sure. In any case most people do not have this option and certainly the software does not exist to do this anyway, so the option I have suggested and has been said to work is to reattach the factory head unit, turn the car and the radio on, crank the volume up, then turn it back off and disconnect the HU. The amp gain will have been left at a high setting, so you should get a wider range of volume by adjusting your sound card's output volume. Please, again be advised that I have not tried this yet. It's also possible that even if this solution works, you'd have to hook the HU back up again and crank the volume if you ever have to disconnect your car battery for some reason (IE the amp will lose its stored gain setting)

2) The voltage on the audio outputs of a computer sound card are typically <2V max, while the RCA line outputs of a typical headunit (probably including BMW's HU output) are often as high as 8V max. There is a car audio device called a line driver that can boost the voltage of an audio signal. Typically it is used to reduce intereference/noise (ref the idiocy at using a line driver vs a real solution such as using balanced audio) but in this case it may actually be a good solution. Hook the line driver up as close to the PC as you can (between the PC and the SVEN4) -- you will be feeding the SVEN4 with a higher voltage input signal, so in theory you will have less loss through the audio transformers in it.

The person who had this problem and claims it is now solved implemented both solutions. #1 seemed to be the most effective, but #2 is probably also a good idea if you can afford to spend the extra $40-$50 bucks on the device.

Good luck!

srcstc: Thanks for keeping that list of carriers going; are those the smoker package or non smoker package parts? BMW has 4 part numbers in total for that trim piece -- for car pc folks, it might be nice to opt for the 'non smoker' version which gives you a larger bin where the ash tray is. I wish I had done that, as I could have had a lot more room in there for maybe some pc control buttons, usb ports etc. Of course you can build these inside of the ash tray too, but it's not as much of a clean slate as a nice empty bin. Plus, if you need somewhere to stash your sunglasses or something, you're not giving up your only bin.

There is also a part that replaces the cup holders with a storage bin. It's a euro part since they don't come with cup holders. Another nice thing to consider when you are losing that other bin.