BMW E36 Blog

I wrote seven articles until now about how you can make your BMW lights turn on automatically at night. I will summarize these posts for you in case you have missed them. 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. In the sixth post, I posted 4 videos that I shoot while testing the auto light system. In case you didn’t see these videos I suggest you check them first before proceeding. In the seventh post, I talked about a problem in controlling the headlights of the car (low beam lights). Until that time, I was able to get my dashboard lights and the angel eyes lights to turn on automatically at night, but not the low beam lights.

When I connect the circuit to control the low beam lights, I hear a buzzing sound that comes from the relay which is supposed to work as an electronic light switch. Normally the buzzing sound indicates that the relay is connecting/disconnecting really fast and that what causes the buzzing sound. So, I tried to analyze the problem to find out what is really happening.

It’s all explained in the electronic diagram below:-

I think that when the Autolight circuit sends a signal to the relay, the relay simply closes the switch which turns the headlights on. The problem occurs when the switch is closed which makes both the relay and the headlights to become connected in parallel and since the headlights resistance is much lower than the relay resistance, the relay simply disconnects which makes the headlights turn off. When the headlights turn off, the electric current passes again through the relay which makes it connect again and thus turn the headlights on again. Of course, this happens very fast which results in a buzzing sound from the relay because it’s connecting/disconnecting very fast. I think I will need to make some change to the circuit to isolate its power source somehow from the headlight power. But how can I do this? this is the big question 😀 . If you have any ideas, please feel free to share them.

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

These are one of the best shots that I’ve ever seen for a BMW E36 in the streets. The car looks great and the background is awesome!. I love it. I just wish that I could get larger versions of these photos to put them as my wallpaper. What do you think? I hope you like them.

Take a look:-

I posted in the last couple days some really bad examples of BMW E36 cars. In the first one, I posted about a silver BMW 318ti with blue stripes that looked very ugly. In yesterday’s post, I presented a bad interior with a mix between gray & black. The reason I posted about that was to see what do you guys think of the mix between black & gray in the car’s interior, but it seems no one could look beyond the fact that the black interior looks very bad and the car’s interior was in a very bad shape.

Anyway, today, I decided to post some nice photos of a BMW E36 that I was hoping it will negate the pervious posts effect on you my dear friends. I hope you like today’s post.

Take a look:-

I wrote six articles until now about how you can make your BMW lights turn on automatically at night. I will summarize these posts for you in case you have missed them. 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. In the sixth post, I posted 4 videos that I shoot while testing the auto light system. In case you didn’t see these videos I suggest you check them first before proceeding.

Aright, today, I decided to solve the last problem that I’ve mentioned in the last post, which is main lights problem. I didn’t know previously which wire(s) I should use to turn the main lights on using the auto-light circuit, so my car used to turn the angel eyes lights and the dashboard lights on automatically at night, but not the main lights. As you can see, this is good, but it’s not good enough. So, I decided to try and solve this problem today. To do that, I looked in my Bentley manual and I found the lighting system diagram for the BMW E36. I finally found that I should use the yellow wire to turn the main lights on, so now it should be a very easy task. Take a look at the new wiring diagram for the auto-light circuit. The new modifications are in red:

Please notice that I’ve introduced 4 diodes to get 4 wires out of the relay to be able to control:
1. Left angel eye light (yellow/gray).
2. Right angel eye light (purple/gray).
3. Dashboard lights (black/gray).
4. Main lights (yellow).

The diodes should serve as a precaution measure to prevent the interference between the 4 parts mentioned above.

With this new information, I thought that I’ve figured the solution to my problem, so I decided to go out and connect it to see if it’s going to work or not.

For some reason, when I connect the fourth controller to the yellow wire (main lights), the circuit started to make a buzzing sound (resulting from the relay being switched on and off very quickly) and the headlights turn on and off very quickly too. I’m not really sure about this problem and how to solve it. So, I’m going to review everything I did. The only reason I can think of right now that is causing this problem is that the relay is not suitable for the headlights some how. I’m going to try another relay with larger current limit and see if this solves the problem. If you guys have any idea why this is happening, I would appreciate your comments.

As you can see, this is still unfinished work, so if you want to implement this in your car, I suggest you wait until I figure out the solution for this problem to avoid paying for parts and work that is not proven to be 100% successful yet.

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

Hello, Honestly I hesitated very much before writing this post. On one hand, this video is showing a Mercedes Benz burning like hell, and this is something that I always wanted to see. What can be a better sight for us BMW E36 enthusiasts 😀 . I know some of you may have some passion for the Mercedes cars but I don’t have any. I hate these cars very much even if some people claim they’re the best cars in the world. For me, I believe they are only second best (You know who is #1 in my opinion, don’t you?). On the other hand, I’m sure it’s a tragedy for the car’s owner. I feel sorry for him for the loss. Just watching it burning like this gives me a stomachache, but then I remember, hey it’s a Mercedes, and the pain goes away instantly 😈 . Take a look I’m not sure how you guys would feel about it.

Take a look :-

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.