01 Nov Down To The Wires
There are just two major parts remaining in our Z4M build — the tune and the electronics wiring. Let’s dive into the latter.
For the Z4M’s electronics installation, there are three major components — the music-related parts (iPod-related hardware, Intravee, etc.), the radar-related Beltronics system and the, um, parking sensor system from LI. What a funny name for a company that sells parking sensors. Although one supposes it makes sense; it uses lasers to determine the distance from the sensor, and “intercepts” you before you drive into the car in front of you. Yes, that explanation worked out perfectly. Either way, we digress; let’s start with the radar-related Beltronics system. Connected to a well-hidden display somewhere in the vehicle, the Beltronics system utilizes a small head unit that controls several functions of the entire system, along with a big ol’ mute button in the middle. To show you just how small it is, check out its size compared to this college-rule notebook paper:
The Beltronics system will come in handy for all those automatic doors that continually paint your car with various bands of radar, pull you over, give you tickets, etc. Since those automatic doors tend to frown upon systems built solely to make their jobs harder, discretion is the name of the game. Therefore, the Beltronics head unit has to be located in a place where it can both be easily accessed and seen by the driver, yet not easily noticed by anybody else. We found a perfect spot for it in the lower part of the center console, just above the seat heater controls.
A small notch in the panel to tuck the wire into, and boom goes the dynamite. From looking at this head unit, you may be thinking, “Now Fluid, doesn’t that still look pretty obvious?” Well, it does…to the driver. The driver is really the only person low enough to see that lower dash panel with any degree of ease. Not to mention the fact that the Z4M’s ashtray has been replaced with an iPod dock. Put an iPod/iPhone into the dock, and the head unit is invisible to all.
Let’s move on to the, um, parking sensor system from LI. There are two switches that come with this system; the first is an on-off switch, which we plan on mounting in the same manner as the head unit for the Beltronics setup — stealthy but still easily reached. The second switch changes modes for the LI system — it switches from the, um, parking sensor mode to the other parking sensor mode (where they actually do function as parking sensors). This switch, as with all the others, will need to be hidden from view. We plan on utilizing an OEM BMW button to act as the power switch, so it could potentially be mounted in plain sight; after looking around for various OEM buttons that more or less matched the size and shape of the Z4M’s circular seat heater buttons, we settled on this R/T button from our parts E38. Believe it or not, the circle is one of the most underused button designs across BMW’s lineup, with rectangles being the most common. The sizes are just about perfectly matched, so we’ll get cracking on utilizing this switch in a future blog post:
We also found an easy spot to mount the mode switch. It needed to be somewhere below the belt line (so those pesky automatic doors don’t see you shuffling around as they walk up to your car) and hidden from almost every single angle. We settled on this circular trim piece on the Z4M’s driver seat. Not only is there just enough room to reach a hand down there, but it’s literally impossible to be seen with the door shut.
Now, with all this complicated machinery comes the complicated computing needed to keep everything functional. Both the, um, parking mode sensors and the Beltronics system utilize speakers to emit an audible alert when you’re driving past radar-equipped automatic doors or trying to, um, park your car. Since a giant jangled mess of wires is not how we do things around Fluid MotorUnion, we put together a small plate to house all three parts of the system – the Beltronics CPU, Beltronics speaker and LI CPU/speaker combination. It should tuck right under the dash, so it will be plenty audible, but still accessible enough if you need to remove all your parts later on.
After a thorough reading of these instructions, it’s good to know that Laser Interceptor takes their placement of the, um, parking sensors incredibly seriously. We never knew, um, parking was such a precise art.
We’ll be back to the Z4M next week. Since today is the opening day of SEMA, expect a metric balls-ton of SEMA and Black Series-related content from both our blog and Facebook page. Time to go From Silence To Violence!!!
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