Electric/heated/sports Seat Retrofit solved

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Fri Dec 02, 2016 10:39 pm

Hi, I currently have manual non heated, non sport seats in my Z4/E89 and have the chance of purchasing some electric/heated/sports seats. Does anyone know what/if any modifications would be required? I'm guessing I don't have the right loom installed... Has anyone got any advice on how easy it would be to put them in?

Thanks

kinger · Post by **kinger** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 10:23 am

I would think that the loom is probably there but just not connected, have you looked under your existing seats for plugs.
Surely the cars have a common loom.
Would need some switches in the console and maybe coding.
I'm only across the border in Somerset and have a Carly if you need the coding part done
Mike

Smartbear · Post by **Smartbear** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 3:04 pm

Not sure about the loom being there, I know on later e85 cars they were missing wiring for things like cruise control.
Present on early cars but then phased out, I'd be surprised if e89's have it.
Rob

Maniac · Post by **Maniac** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 4:31 pm

There's a common core loom, but options are added into the loom and aren't present for everything. A single loom for cars with many options is very wasteful/costly. Not sure about heated seats tho, but if you want better seats then get them and if the heating doesn't work you still have nicer seats.

Maniac · Post by **Maniac** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 4:32 pm

There's a common core loom, but options are added into the loom and aren't present for everything. A single loom for cars with many options is very wasteful/costly. Not sure about heated seats tho, but if you want better seats then get them and if the heating doesn't work you still have nicer seats.

ibroker · Post by **ibroker** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 5:45 pm

Be a fairly easy process to run a switched live to the plug on the bottom of the seat for the Movement, same could be said for the dash switches for heat if your inclined enough to tinker, you dont have to disturb any existing systems if you dont want to just bypass them.

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Sat Dec 03, 2016 6:45 pm

Thanks guys, I guess I'll just have to see if the electric movement works without any tinkering at first...(fingers crossed)! I'm happy bypassing the controls but it would be lovely to have the heated seats on the centre console if I could find the precise part with my configuration.. I believe there's three heat settings as well - so it must be a bit more sophisticated than just a single cable I expect(?).

Thanks kinger for the offer of coding I'm just on the Devon/Somerset border so that might be useful.

I'll let you know how I get on.

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Tue Dec 06, 2016 12:34 pm

So, I swapped my passenger seat with the new one. As suspected, nothing at all from the seat (although the car recognises the module has changed). I've read the following thread multiple times and now have a reasonable grasp of what is required.. its for a E90 but everything looks the same on the seat connectors :-

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=480313

On my car, with no electric anything the loom is not set up at all for anything like this, so I will need to run power/earth to quite a few of the connections on the car side first. Hopefully this should mean I will get some movement working soon.

For heating, I can't quite see how I'd do this. there appears to be two separate solutions - the passenger side has PWM(?) on pin 1, whereas the drivers has K_CAN on pins 2 and 3 (in addition to the power +/- on 9 and 8 by my reasoning). I'll spend some more time seeing if this is possible, but whilst heat would be nice, its the last thing on my list.

I'll post more details as I progress...

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 10:36 pm

So using the posts above, and my existing seat connectors I was able to work out the pins necessary for the functions to work.

This is my passenger car side connector - with just about nothing on it (no power as my seats were the very basic ones).

To get movement I added live on terminal 4, ground on terminal 13 + for bolster adjustment live on terminal 7 to the car side connector (see picture). I got the female terminals from BMW (difference sizes required), they are pretty cheap.

61131383776 = small female connectors (bolster) £0.40
61138364844 = large female connections (live/ground) for movement £1

I chose to go backwards through the car to the battery as it was fairly easy to do so. There's a hole behind the shoulder speaker that you can run the cables through (takes a little time to remove these panels but its not hard). I did toy with the idea of connecting to the fuse box, but its all very tight under there and I didn't want to dislodge anything. Here's a picture of the passenger side in.

Whilst the seats are heated, I need a switched PWM signal for it to work. I've had a brief search to see if I can find something, but its not obvious how to do this. Has anyone any suggestions on doing this?

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:53 pm

Well it took a little longer than I expected with the drivers seat (as I expected). If anyone is trying to do something similar then here's my experience!

I thought I'd just need to replicate the passenger side mentioned above (just for the movement, not heating), plus the k_can connections, but it turns out you need one additional earth for the seat module to work (pin 8 ).

What I wasn't sure of was that in the e90 thread they tell you the seat movement doesn't work until you've connected the K_can connections - mine were connected and coded but nothing worked.. As I'm an occasional NCSExpert user, I always get a little nervous when doing the coding, but its generally not too bad when you practice. The most difficult time was trying to reset the airbag lights - the version on INPA I had didn't really work.. so I had to get a new version which has E89 (instead of trying E90) and is all in german and very confusing.

Eventually I re-read the drivers side connector diagram in the attached thread, and guessed that maybe the seat module needed additional ground connection.

So I now have electric bolsters, movement and memory, which is nice.

I'd like heating but I'm not sure if just fitting the switch on the dash would do it... so I'm avoiding that for the moment. Maybe in the future..when one comes on ebay that has the right configuration (there's one on the german site but the logos are worn). Looking forward to driving it again now... I've had the seat in an undriveable position for about a week because I couldn't move it... so everything is great now!

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Sun Mar 05, 2017 6:17 pm

I eventually found the right switch panel on ebay (from Lithuania), and fitted it. Straight away the drivers side switch light worked on the drivers side, and after a couple of minutes the seat was warm and toasty!

I was quite surprised but very happy!

The passenger side though doesn't light up. I think that's because the drivers side has the 'seat module' (which has memory and heating, controlled by the KCAN network), whereas the passenger side has the 'heated seat module' (which only has heating, and controlled by the PWM circuit). So, I've either I've got to keep that fact that I've got heating from the wife

or I've got to do a little more work to save me from the nagging..

I managed to find a retrofit cabling diagram for heated seats on the 3 series, and this suggests I need to add a cable from pin 1 (seat connector) to pin38 on x14270 (connected to the fuse box), and add +ve to pin 5 (seat connector..).. so that's my next task to complete. Fingers crossed that this will solve it!

djstan · Post by **djstan** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 2:01 pm

Nice work! I think I would have given up a LONG time ago (if I had started at all!

)

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 2:57 pm

Thanks... next time I'll wait for a car with everything I wanted in it... but then where's the fun in that

clarker63 · Post by **clarker63** » Sun Sep 24, 2017 5:29 pm

Well it took longer than I hoped but I now have the passenger seat working

I ended up working out that I also needed to add pin 8 and 9 on the seat connector (-ve and +ve0) a well as those I described above. Pin 38 on the big connector (x14270) on the back of the fuse box was a bit of a pain too, as I couldn't work out which one was pin 38. Eventually I found a picture, and a post that said the connector slides out and you can then see numbers on the side of it.

[IMG]http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr13 ... /pin38.png[/IMG]

I bought a female connector from BMW to use within it. however even when I had done all those things, its still didn't work!

I had tried a few times and was beginning to loose patience, but today I spotted in addition to coding CAS and FRM (494 + 459), you also need to update JBBF and IHK (http://www.babybmw.net/forum/viewtopic. ... 5&start=15). You just need to sg_codiren each module with no changes.I think mine had Z in front of those module names. When I did that I heard a click, and the passenger seat heating control now worked... and the seat warmed up. Finally its worth all the effort.... but next time I buy a car I'll definitely be looking for one with them in ....

Hope this helps someone else... !

Kugaman1 · Post by **Kugaman1** » Sun Sep 24, 2017 9:33 pm

Wow, good efforts mate!

Definitely buy a car with the desired options already fitted in future!

Z4-forum.com

Z4-forum.com