Active comfort seat repurpose

[yurikus]

Gentlemen,

I am in possession of an F10 M5 passenger seat, circa 2014-2016, which I'd like to use as my office chair. I'm a software engineer, who makes a living with his butt. Why not treat my butt with something nice.

Looking at the A26 seat module pin-out diagrams on newtis.info, I see that A26*3B receives power and ground in pins 7 and 8 respectively. This comes from connector X12B pins 15 and 16. Seat module then takes care of taking with seat switch over LIN and is wired as linked.

Documentation says that seat module is autonomous, even though it talks over LIN bus to other car electronics. I tried applying power to pins of connector X12 and nothing happened. TIS speaks of a special adapter cable that is needed to test functionality of a removed seat. I wonder what does the cable do?

Main Question: Short of rewiring the whole seat with relays, how do I fool the seat module into thinking everything is OK?

IMAGES: https://goo.gl/photos/wh1oq8uqjnzEt2gCA

[Skeletor]

I'm in the process of doing the same thing with the standard seats out of my 01' X5 but I can't say that I've had any issues with it. When I first pulled them out, I just put 12v power directly to the seat motors to get them where I wanted them, and then started looking at the harness that's under the seat. I'm not sure how much the seats have changed from an 01' X5 to a 14' M5, but the seats that I have are autonomous. Even the memory buttons work on mine, I can't say that they're to the exact positions that I had the seats in before, but they do move the seat. I looked for two wires that were in the same plug (positive and negative) and put 12v to it and the seat came to life.

This cable that the TIS talks about for bench testing might just have a jumper wire or something in it. Can you find any more information on it? I would imagine that the seat computer might just need power on another pin to think that it's in a car (for the same reason that the TIS has a testing cable for removed seats). Could you post a link to the documentation that you're looking at?

[yurikus]

I did try to apply power to the motors themselves and front/back movement worked, as well as front seat height adjustment. Thigh support didn't want to budge and seatback and headrest motors are inaccessible without removing the back.

Everything I have on the cable so far is linked in the post. The jumpered pins idea did cross my mind, but I don't want to go jumping pins blindly ...

Docs are a bit vague (to me) about the "activation" and "initialisation" procedure for the seats as well.

Here are some pictures, I can make more on request.

https://goo.gl/photos/wh1oq8uqjnzEt2gCA

[yurikus]

Originally Posted by Skeletor

Could you post a link to the documentation that you're looking at?

There's a bunch of links in my original post, do they work for you?

[Zulu95]

61 4 150 Connects the removed seat to the plug in vehicle to allow testing.

[yurikus]

Originally Posted by Zulu95

61 4 150 Connects the removed seat to the plug in vehicle to allow testing.

That's exactly what I linked to, are inline links broken for everybody or ...?

Originally Posted by yurikus

TIS speaks of a special adapter cable that is needed to test functionality of a removed seat. I wonder what does the cable do?

Let me rephrase: Is there anything special in the cable or all magic happens on the other end - Shop PC?

[Zulu95]

It connects the seat to the vehicle while it is out of vehicle. All you need is this cable and the vehicle it came from to get your seat working the way you want. Might be a little difficult to get it in the house.

[yurikus]

Originally Posted by Zulu95

... All you need is this cable and the vehicle it came from ...

Sigh, thank you for a reply bursting with factual, usable information.