Note: this is from a third party, and I accept no responsibility for accuracy or inaccuracy. The 'pinouts referenced below' have been added to the previous page's pinout information, and is not included in this file.

It was a painful process but I finally got it working. For starters, Phatnoise will not sell you the adapter/cable you need to connect your PB to the Bimmer. So after talking with several people who owned the BMW PB someone agreed to order the kit for me. Turns out Phatnoise just sent him a URL to a hidden section of their online store (http://store.yahoo.com/phatnoise/adapter-kit-bmw.html). So, I went to the online store and purchased the kit. It arrived a week later. The kit installs super easy but I had to do some modifications to the plastic tray in the trunk in order to mount the PB (I didn't want to buy the $250 BMW CD changer installation kit). So everything was installed but I had a major problem. The unit worked fine except I was only getting audio from the left side of the car. Did some research and found that BMW uses balanced differential audio which means instead of having a audio ground, left audio and right audio line they have Left+, Left-, Right+, Right- and Audio Ground. So now it was time to test the PB to make sure it was still pumping out left and right audio. I was able to get some information from Phatnoise to find out what pins are what on the Phatbox units and it turns out they're common across the VW and BMW PB units. I took apart the Blitzsafe adapter and jumpered wires from the PB end (8pin DIN) to a set of computer speakers. I was able to get left and right audio out of the PB. That meant the problem lied with the Blitzsafe adapter. Then I started buzzing out the BMW prewire cable. There are 6 pins of which 5 are used. Going on the principle that the system used balanced differential audio, I assumed that the 5 pins would be L+,L-,R+,R- and Audio Ground. However, after doing the continuity test, only 3 pins are independent and 2 were bridged. I then ran some tests and figured out which pins were left and right audio. After I knew that, I simply desoldered the left and right audio pins from the PCB on the Blitzsafe adapter (BMW connection end) and soldered them directly to the left and right audio solder points on the PB adapter side. So now the audio goes directly from the PB to the BMW head unit. All the Blitzsafe is doing is converting the PB control signals into BMW I-Bus signals.



Pretty long winded email but the solution is quite simple to implement. I've included the pinouts and other information below. What's not there is the location of the left and right audio pins on the BMW 6pin cable. It's pretty simple though. There is one side with only one pin in use, the middle two pins are bridged and then there are two pins on the other end. That's the left and right audio.



You can try and purchase the BMW adapter kit from Phatnoise but I've heard from someone else who ordered the kit after me that they were denied the purchase because they didn't own the BMW PB. If you can't order the kit you could order the Blitzsafe adapter by itself (there is a BMW version that's used to hookup an Alpine CD changer) from other vendors. However, I read somewhere that Phatnoise modifies the Blitzsafe adapters before shipping them out. By default the Blitzsafe adapter switches on 12V but it also has the capability of switching on 5V by modifying a solder jumper on the PCB. When I had my Blitzsafe adapter apart I did notice this modification as the 12V/5V point is silkscreened on the PCB. Once you modified your Blitzsafe you could purchase a 8 pin DIN connector and connect it to your VW cable using the pinouts I've listed below.