Congratulations! I understand perfectly, I have a baby on the way also. Ours is due April 17th. When is yours coming? I appreciate your willingness to help me out with the coding. Do you already have the cord and whatever else is needed? If not, maybe we could just split the cost of everything we need to code both cars. Take your time though, I'm in no rush...there are definitely higher priorities right now. A couple or 3 months sounds cool. Btw...what part of the valley are you in? I'm in Central Phx., but we are seriously considering moving before the baby comes. Love the house we're in now, but hate the neighborhood. Let me know and thanks for lookin out for a fellow member.

Nate

 

Congratulations to you too! Mine is due December 22nd so we're nearing crunch time. Painting nuseries and what not... When I could be working on my car! Anyway, I don't have the cable or anything yet. I'm also wondering after snooping around BMW Coding if I should get a battery tender to ensure power to the car? I'm not sure if it's entirely necessary... It will take me a little while to get everything together. I have some suspension work to do as well so it all depends on priority. I live in north Peoria. I'll let you know.

 

Definitely use a battery tender during coding. I always charge a vehicle at 4 amps for about 10 minutes before I start coding. During this 10 minutes, I set up the laptop, read and rename / save the trace files. These saved trace files make it easy to reverse changes in the event of operator error, or if the module shows unexpected behaviour / paramaters after coding. The battery tender stays on during coding. Also ensure that the laptop computer has a fresh charge, good batteries and preferably on AC power during coding. Last thing one needs is for the vehicle power or laptop power to fail during coding or programming. Such interruption could leave a module in an unresponsive state, requiring a replacement module.

 

Or a messed up cable like the first two I bought. LOL damn chinese copies. After Screwing something up and putting my tail between my legs at the dealer I bought a good cable... a bit more but definitely paid for itself on first use anyway.

 

Do I need to upgrade my CCC to do this? I have 2005 525i with 2011 Nav software but my CCC is the original build.

Thanks!

 

You shouldnt need to update, unless your car has the very old original idrive software. The easiest way to tell if it will work is to pull the trc file and see if the parameters are present.

 

I don't think this is necessary at all unless you're doing some serious updates via WinKFP, etc. I have coded upwards 40+ cars and never hooked up to a battery tender. Some cars I have spent as long as 30 minutes and it's always been fine. The one exception was Jasper's car, but his battery was wonky to start anyway, so that don't really count.

 

lol @ wonky. I thought I was among the last to use that word.

But yeah - using a battery tender is overkill for coding. I've even gone as far as coding with my engine running with zero issues so far (knocks on wood). From what I know about WinKFP, it will fail the flash deliberately if the voltage falls outside what it considers to be safe parameters. Scary stuff.

 

Hehe. Yah, I actually have code with the engine on as well. Kind of discovered that it was okay by accident. However, I am still a bit cautious of doing that with certain modules though. Figure I shouldn't push my luck, hahaha.

 

TMC_REGIONAL_C


Dont work on UK E60`s, I tried it on mine and I lost TMC all together.