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.

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.

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.

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.