(100% Done) E93 FLA High Beam Assist Retrofit (DIY)

[SaNGRia]

Originally Posted by Xantor_

Thanks to SaNGRia for sharing your knowledge with us.

Again this is not any critic, it's just an addition for newbies like me.

INFO: I talked to Sangria yesterday and it seems that the dimming issues apply to all M3 cars. My car is a 335is E93 and I didn't encounter any dimming issues. We both shared our plugs and we have the same pinout.

Looking good. I will edit couple places on the first page. Thank you bro.

[Adam M]

Just reviving this with some extra thanks to Sangria and what could be new info.

My car came with FLA1 and comfort access. I wanted to install homelink which is very very uncommon in the uk as no one has garages etc. with help from Kevinm03 who has an E92, we hybridized two mirrors to add the European homelink frequency module to my oem mirror (433MHz vs 315MHz in the US).

All great and working. I then discovered that the compass feature is a listed option that my car doesn’t have, so decided I want to add this.

It turns out that compass is a feature of the main board of the mirror, not just the glass so to add it to mine would cost me the oem wiring set up that I currently have since the plugs and pin outs are different if the mirror isn’t native to a cabriolet.

That means finding a compass mirror from an E88, E89 or E93.

Great but to add more complications I wanted to switch to FLA2 while I was bothering to find a new mirror. This has the same issue since the plugs for FLA are different between version 1 and version 2.

So the plan was to buy a compass mirror with FLA2 from the factory from a convertible. Sangria informed me that this doesn’t exist and since I didn’t want to repin was going to have Sangria do it for me and send me the mirror.

We started hunting for two mirrors to hybridise and in our travels Sangria discovered a mirror on eBay which actually does combine all the features needed in one mirror, listed for an E88,E89 and E93 with the much superior FLA2.

As an added bonus it came with the FLA2 specific cowling.

For anyone interested, part number is 51169174316.

The reasons this is interesting is in Sangrias previous repinning he has been left with permanently 20% dimmed wing mirrors which results in over heating and eventually failure of that function. He has been forced to disable the feature in coding to protect the mirrors. We are hoping that will not be the case here as this mirror should be pnp in the uk.

The only issue I will have is that the homelink frequency range transmitted by the mirror will be 315MHz and so will not work with my homelink receiver. I will likely have to switch over the homelink transmitter coils in the mirrors.

Sangria believes the alarm radio receiver will work out of the box but I’m not sure the US frequencies are the same as EU for this purpose and so I will test for it first before swapping anything out. If it doesn’t work, it should just be a case of swapping that module over too, again pnp.

Sorry for the long winded post.

[SaNGRia]

Adam, you are a lucky guy I am just hoping you will not have the dimming issue and if that happens, i will be hunting to get the same mirror. This post should be pinned since it makes a PnP swap for the FLA mirror retrofit on E93s!

Originally Posted by Adam M

Just reviving this with some extra thanks to Sangria and what could be new info.

My car came with FLA1 and comfort access. I wanted to install homelink which is very very uncommon in the uk as no one has garages etc. with help from Kevinm03 who has an E92, we hybridized two mirrors to add the European homelink frequency module to my oem mirror (433MHz vs 315MHz in the US).

All great and working. I then discovered that the compass feature is a listed option that my car doesn’t have, so decided I want to add this.

It turns out that compass is a feature of the main board of the mirror, not just the glass so to add it to mine would cost me the oem wiring set up that I currently have since the plugs and pin outs are different if the mirror isn’t native to a cabriolet.

That means finding a compass mirror from an E88, E89 or E93.

Great but to add more complications I wanted to switch to FLA2 while I was bothering to find a new mirror. This has the same issue since the plugs for FLA are different between version 1 and version 2.

So the plan was to buy a compass mirror with FLA2 from the factory from a convertible. Sangria informed me that this doesn’t exist and since I didn’t want to repin was going to have Sangria do it for me and send me the mirror.

We started hunting for two mirrors to hybridise and in our travels Sangria discovered a mirror on eBay which actually does combine all the features needed in one mirror, listed for an E88,E89 and E93 with the much superior FLA2.

As an added bonus it came with the FLA2 specific cowling.

For anyone interested, part number is 51169174316.

The reasons this is interesting is in Sangrias previous repinning he has been left with permanently 20% dimmed wing mirrors which results in over heating and eventually failure of that function. He has been forced to disable the feature in coding to protect the mirrors. We are hoping that will not be the case here as this mirror should be pnp in the uk.

The only issue I will have is that the homelink frequency range transmitted by the mirror will be 315MHz and so will not work with my homelink receiver. I will likely have to switch over the homelink transmitter coils in the mirrors.

Sangria believes the alarm radio receiver will work out of the box but I’m not sure the US frequencies are the same as EU for this purpose and so I will test for it first before swapping anything out. If it doesn’t work, it should just be a case of swapping that module over too, again pnp.

Sorry for the long winded post.

[Adam M]

Confirm today that the oem mirror I bought seems to display the same dimming issue.

But my mirrors are not even getting tepid to the touch so am not really concerned.

I can confirm that the remote receiver from the us car is 315MHz whereas the uk one is 868MHz so the mirror didn’t work until I swapped the aerial receiver over.

[Adam M]

I can also confirm the fla1 and fla2 cameras are interchangeable on the arm and that the cowling is the same for both.

[Xantor_]

Originally Posted by Adam M

I can also confirm the fla1 and fla2 cameras are interchangeable on the arm and that the cowling is the same for both.

But changing the camera wont make the system more reliable, right? The Chip on a fla2 is also different to a FLA1?

[Takummie]

Originally Posted by SaNGRia

Can you share pictures directly, they are not visible on my end!

Oops, my bad.
Sorry I haven’t been active for a long time
I’ve had several revisions of the bracket design and the current one is a 2 axis adjustable mount that glues to the back of the rain/light sensor. It’s tucked roughly in the OEM position so the sketchy PCB is not visible to both occupants. I should do something about it but I don’t care enough to lol
since FLA was never offered in Japan, no OEM brackets/cowls are available. That maybe the hardest part for a Japanese E93 if you want to keep the ETC feature
FLA works perfect with this piggyback setup. I’ve moved the image sensor around and it didn’t really matter. There are codes in FLA that fine adjusts the angle compensations and stuff but they seem unnecessary.
Here are the pictures of how it looks now! See attached

[SaNGRia]

Interesting, so the one that connected to FLA sensor, what that board about ?

[treishu]

@takummie so you basically have 2 mirror boards in your car.
one with all the stuff related to credit card etc and the other board just for the FLA?
did you hide the second board under the FZD?

i am going to do this too as i have a mirror with compass and homelink and don’t want to lose these by swapping the FLA mirror.