BMW E36 Blog

Hello all, I’ve received this nice tip from David (I’m not going to mention his full name or location, you will know why later) with a nice way to hide your garage door opener behind the light switch cavity. I think this is a nice and smart trick that will make your life easier besides it’s very easy and doesn’t cost much. Here’s the tip in David’s words.

Just wanted to let you know that an easy mod to get rid of that ugly garage door opener is to put it behind the headlight switch cavity. I looked around your website and did not find this, so I hope I’m not repeating something you may have already posted. I took my opener apart (there’s not much to it on the inside), soldered a couple of wires to the switch, and put a momentary contact switch that I got at Radio Shack in the blank spot on the foglight bazel. I used Velcro to mount the thing inside the cavity, plus one on a new 9v. battery. It looks really cool, plus no one will know I have it, so there are no worries about someone breaking into my car to steal the opener and get into my garage. Hope you find this useful.

So, what do you think of this trick? Thank you David for sharing it.

If you guys have any similar tips or tricks that you think may be useful to other BMW E36 owners, please feel free to let me know. I will post them just like this one.

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.

As I promised in my previous post Turning Your BMW Lights On Automatically At Night . . . Soldering, I connected the autolight circuit to the car and decided to put it into the test. But before jumping into the test videos, I will try to summarize what I’ve done through this project in case someone has missed my previous posts.

I wrote five articles until now about how you can make your BMW lights turn on automatically at night. In the first post, I proved that this should be something easy to implement inside a BMW E36 car. In the second post, I presented a circuit diagram that will help you create the electronic circuit that is supposed to control your lights and turn them on automatically when it gets dark. Of course, if you don’t know how to implement such a circuit or you simply feeling too lazy to do it, you can ask some electrician to do it for you. I’m sure he will agree if you paid him $20. In the third post, I wrote about my first attempt to implement this circuit and told you that it’s partially working but it needed some enhancements. In the fourth post, I created a video with the circuit implemented on breadboard and connected directly to my brother’s car lights. In the fifth post, I soldered the circuit on permanent board and showed you exactly how I intend to use it inside my car.

Ok, now I hope you’re ready to watch the test videos for the autolight project. The videos were shot by my wife while I was driving the car. As you can see, it is not dark yet, so I had to go under some tunnels to show you how it’s going to work.

In the next video, you will see the light sensor (it’s ugly I know) which is responsible for sending the proper signal to the control circuit when it gets dark. You can see also that I used the tail light switch to enable/disable the autolight circuit (temporarily):

Take a look :-

In the next videos, I’m showing the car in different situations and how the autolight circuit is responding correctly to the light changes. You will need to pay special attention to notice the changes when the dashboard lights are turned on then off again.

For your information, I’ve burned something while doing the installation of the circuit … can you figure out what it is?

Now, I’m sure that you have a burning question in your mind. Tony, why you didn’t take a shot of the car while driving from outside to show us how the headlights are working? To be honest with you all, until now I figured how I can turn the lights of the angle lights (the circles) and the dashboard lights.

I couldn’t figure out why the headlights didn’t work correctly. It seems I didn’t connect the correct wires and because I was rushing to take the videos before it gets dark, I decided to do this next week :-).

Oh yes, one last thing. If you have any comments about how I can enhance this more or you know how the headlights are controlled by the headlight switch (what is the color of the wires), please let me know. this is the only thing that I still need to to figure out before having a complete auto-light system in my car 😈

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.

This post was contributed by Paul from Latvia (He’s a loyal reader of the BMW E36 Blog). He sent me these photos of his car and his friend’s car (I think) after taking some really nice shots in an old paper factory left from the USSR. The cars look great and the photos are awesome. Thanks Paul.

Take a look:-

BMW E36 Blog: The ultimate BMW E36 M3 information source.

Before I start this post. There’s one thing that is really confusing me? Why I’m not getting any response for these articles from you guys? Don’t you like to make your car headlights turn on automatically like the 200X cars? Isn’t that cool? Come on people, let me hear what you think good or bad 😈 .

I wrote four articles until now about how you can make your BMW lights turn on automatically at night. In the first post, I proved that this should be something easy to implement inside a BMW E36 car. In the second post, I presented a circuit diagram that will help you create the electronic circuit that is supposed to control your lights and turn them on automatically when it gets dark. In the third post, I wrote about my first attempt to implement this circuit and told you that it’s partially working but it needed some enhancements. In the fourth post, I created a video with the circuit implemented on breadboard and connected directly to my brother’s car lights. The video showed how the car lights turned on when I covered the light sensor with my hand (tricking the sensor to "think" it’s dark). So, the circuit is working correctly as intended.

In this new post, I soldered the circuit on permanent board and the end result looks like this:

I made sure that this circuit has the following:

1. Two wires for power (positive and negative).
2. Two long wires that are connected to the external light sensor. I made them long because I’m still not sure where I’m going to place that sensor. Take a look at this:

3. Three wires connected to an external variable resistor, this will allow us to adjust how sensitive the unit will be for light. Take a look at this:

4. Three wires that will deliver current from the battery directly to the headlights when it becomes dark.

With this circuit implemented, I think I’m ready to integrate this into my car. I hope in the next week, I will post a video here while I’m driving my car under a tunnel and show you how everything will work. :-). But please let me know what do you think of all this? Also, if you have any ideas about where I should put the light sensor, please let me know.

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.

I wrote three articles until now about how you can make your BMW lights turn on automatically at night. In the first post, I proved that this should be something easy to implement inside a BMW E36 car. In the second post, I presented a circuit diagram that will help you create the electronic circuit that is supposed to control your lights and to turn them on automatically at night. In the third post, I wrote about my first attempt to implement this circuit and told you that it’s partially working but it needed some enhancements.

Today, I had the time to re-implement the circuit that I’ve been talking about and I connected it to the car. Then, I shot this video for the circuit in action. In the video, I tried to put my hands closer to the light sensor to make it "think" it’s night. Take a look at the video and let me know what you all think.

Note: this car is not mine, it’s my brother’s car and it’s dirty as usual 😆 .

Enjoy :-

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.