My e60 - Dension Help!!!
Discussion
Hi Guys
ive just recently bought a bmw e60, I didn't the "NO" extra's with regards to media would bother me but, who burns CD's these days?
ive been doing some looking round and would love one of the Dension 500 gateways put in. im not very hands on when it comes to cars so would need it fitting by my local ICE garage.
just wanted abit more information on them if anyone is well up on them? as I said my car hasn't been spec'd at all for entertainment, it doesn't have a changer no nav etc just a CD player, so what would I need apart from the gateway to have Aux/USB/and ability to watch movies from USB?
I don't really have a budget I just want to be able to stick a hard drive in the glovebox full of songs rather than having to burn CD's
Thanks in advance
ive just recently bought a bmw e60, I didn't the "NO" extra's with regards to media would bother me but, who burns CD's these days?
ive been doing some looking round and would love one of the Dension 500 gateways put in. im not very hands on when it comes to cars so would need it fitting by my local ICE garage.
just wanted abit more information on them if anyone is well up on them? as I said my car hasn't been spec'd at all for entertainment, it doesn't have a changer no nav etc just a CD player, so what would I need apart from the gateway to have Aux/USB/and ability to watch movies from USB?
I don't really have a budget I just want to be able to stick a hard drive in the glovebox full of songs rather than having to burn CD's
Thanks in advance
I've got a Dension Gateway in my 57 plate E61. It's the older metal box Dension, which doesn't have bluetooth (my car came with bluetooth built in). My car also has a changer and nav, and the larger professional dash screen.
I fitted the Dension in place of the changer, under the glovebox. Simple job, just two fibre cables and an unswitched 12v supply.
It works well, playing mp3 from a USB memory stick. No video though.
If your car doesn't have a changer, it will probably have to be coded by a BMW dealer.
Can your car play mp3 CDs? If it can't, that will need coding too.
I fitted the Dension in place of the changer, under the glovebox. Simple job, just two fibre cables and an unswitched 12v supply.
It works well, playing mp3 from a USB memory stick. No video though.
If your car doesn't have a changer, it will probably have to be coded by a BMW dealer.
Can your car play mp3 CDs? If it can't, that will need coding too.
Ive got the same denison in mine, fitted by the previous owner. The only useful thing about it are the RCA inputs so I can use my mobile to listen to radio 6 etc because my damn aerial wire keeps breaking (thanks for the rubbish tailgate design BMW...). There look like better options out there now that have dab/bluetooth and one which has touch screen nav. If anyone knows whether you can upgrade a logic 7 system to CIC I'd be rather interested in a few details.
Bit of a resurrection but didn't seem worth starting a new thread.
I have acquired a 2007 LCI E61 525. It has business idrive, no bluetooth and no cd changer. It does have cd changer prep cables in glove box.
I'd like to fit a Denison 500s BT.
I've read quite a bit and watch some youtube and I'm very comfortable with the physical installation side of it. That looks quite straight forward.
But the coding bit (which I will need to do I believe) looks a bit bewildering. I don't have a cable or software for this but can see that I can buy that stuff for about £20 but then when I read stuff about doing the coding, it seems far from user friendly and people seem to run into all sorts of problems.
So I'm tempted to just buy this for £50 from Denison like it will just do what I need it to do in a very user friendly manner. But it sounds like that's all it will ever do and it will only do that on one vehicle.
http://shop.dension.com/en/gateway-enabler-for-bmw...
So I'm torn, if I go down the more the DIY route, it's cheaper and it might be useful for other things further down the line but I'm very uncomfortable at the prospect of messing with something I really don't understand.
Any thoughts/experience from anyone?
I have acquired a 2007 LCI E61 525. It has business idrive, no bluetooth and no cd changer. It does have cd changer prep cables in glove box.
I'd like to fit a Denison 500s BT.
I've read quite a bit and watch some youtube and I'm very comfortable with the physical installation side of it. That looks quite straight forward.
But the coding bit (which I will need to do I believe) looks a bit bewildering. I don't have a cable or software for this but can see that I can buy that stuff for about £20 but then when I read stuff about doing the coding, it seems far from user friendly and people seem to run into all sorts of problems.
So I'm tempted to just buy this for £50 from Denison like it will just do what I need it to do in a very user friendly manner. But it sounds like that's all it will ever do and it will only do that on one vehicle.
http://shop.dension.com/en/gateway-enabler-for-bmw...
So I'm torn, if I go down the more the DIY route, it's cheaper and it might be useful for other things further down the line but I'm very uncomfortable at the prospect of messing with something I really don't understand.
Any thoughts/experience from anyone?
The dension device is "plug & play" simplicity and does work out of the box, I used one on my 2004 645 just fine. I agree that the coding is far more complex; I took the view that even if I could get a bricked car reset the risk & potential agro wasnt worth the cost of the dension device.
I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
Collectingbrass said:
The dension device is "plug & play" simplicity and does work out of the box, I used one on my 2004 645 just fine. I agree that the coding is far more complex; I took the view that even if I could get a bricked car reset the risk & potential agro wasnt worth the cost of the dension device.
I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
Cheers. I did order the dongle in the end. Not arrived yet but I'm hoping it will be plain sailing. I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
Why don't you just upgrade to an android unit? I have done this upgrade and its 100x better than the standard old CCC, and it gives you the ability to play videos, live stream youtube and many other apps, it's also got regular updates to match the latest iDrive versions. It also comes with 2x USB ports which you can use to connect USB/Hardware too, all within £500, a bargain I say!
Iddz said:
Why don't you just upgrade to an android unit? I have done this upgrade and its 100x better than the standard old CCC, and it gives you the ability to play videos, live stream youtube and many other apps, it's also got regular updates to match the latest iDrive versions. It also comes with 2x USB ports which you can use to connect USB/Hardware too, all within £500, a bargain I say!
Honestly, the main reason for this is that each time I've read about these units in the past, I keep reading about them being glitchy. I don't know different models and I realise some will be better than others but it was enough to put me off. It might be a little late now but would be interested to hear what model you use and your own experience. I assume you can retain all the other car and OBC functions through the idrive?Gad-Westy said:
Collectingbrass said:
The dension device is "plug & play" simplicity and does work out of the box, I used one on my 2004 645 just fine. I agree that the coding is far more complex; I took the view that even if I could get a bricked car reset the risk & potential agro wasnt worth the cost of the dension device.
I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
Cheers. I did order the dongle in the end. Not arrived yet but I'm hoping it will be plain sailing. I don't know whether they are only good for one car or not, but you'll probably find that by the time you change cars again bluetooth will be standard in your price range.
Arrrrgh, bloody cars!
Dension unit arrived today so, since I finished work early, I decided to have a go at installing it.
All seemed straight forward. It's powered up, my phone bluetooth can see it and connect to it. Gateway enabler does bugger all!
The instructions are absolutely hopeless. Starting form first principles, I wanted to know if the Gateway unit was actually connected okay. I get a constant blue light if I plug the cable hub thing into one of the 9 pin ports or a flashing blue light if I plug it into the other. Nothing in the instructions seems to indicate which is correct or what the lights mean.
When I plug the gateway enabler in, it never goes green to indicate it's finished doing its thing. I've followed the instructions to the letter and tried various other things too. A key part seems to be that the gateway adaptor has to be working, but how do I know if it is or not?
Dension offer support if I can generate log codes. Great, I'll go down that route. Except the usb port on the gateway enabler isn't supported by windows 10 or even 8 which means both the PC laptops I have kicking around cannot be used and now I need to find a pc with a 10 year old operating system.
F'ing annoyed tonight. Right now it feels like I have bought a £400 brick.
Dension unit arrived today so, since I finished work early, I decided to have a go at installing it.
All seemed straight forward. It's powered up, my phone bluetooth can see it and connect to it. Gateway enabler does bugger all!
The instructions are absolutely hopeless. Starting form first principles, I wanted to know if the Gateway unit was actually connected okay. I get a constant blue light if I plug the cable hub thing into one of the 9 pin ports or a flashing blue light if I plug it into the other. Nothing in the instructions seems to indicate which is correct or what the lights mean.
When I plug the gateway enabler in, it never goes green to indicate it's finished doing its thing. I've followed the instructions to the letter and tried various other things too. A key part seems to be that the gateway adaptor has to be working, but how do I know if it is or not?
Dension offer support if I can generate log codes. Great, I'll go down that route. Except the usb port on the gateway enabler isn't supported by windows 10 or even 8 which means both the PC laptops I have kicking around cannot be used and now I need to find a pc with a 10 year old operating system.
F'ing annoyed tonight. Right now it feels like I have bought a £400 brick.
Well, it now works.
Just for the benefit of anyone who finds this thread and has similar problems, this is how it was resolved in the end.
I had two problems.
First problems was that the enbabler dongle thing, despite being bought new from Dension themselves, needed to be updated. That's a bit annoying in itself but more challenging was the fact that you need a pc running windows 7 or older and 32bit version at that. The latter is not documented anywhere that I have seen but caused much confusion! So after several hours of windows reinstalls on an olde laptop, the enabler tool was updated. It then worked okay, it seemed with the light on it turning green after doing its things, which it hadn't done before the update.
Next problem was that although I could see that bluetooth was now enabled on the idrive, there was still no sign of a CD changer.
Again, something that I haven't seen documented anywhere by Dension but I'd read somewhere else was that there was a possibility that the MOST cable might not be looped from the factory. My car has no bluetooth, nav or CD changer but did have CD prep. In my example, it terms out that the CD prep onward cable never loops back to CCC. I found this out by taking the CCC out and directly connecting the MOST cables that came with the Dension unit to the CCC and eureka, the Dension then appeared on the iDrive.
Next problem was that to install the dension in the glove box (which I wanted to do), the MOST cables supplied are too short. So I made the two MOST cables supplied by Dension into one long one and then used one of the existing MOST cables from the CD changer prep, making sure I'd identified which is which first.
After that, it was just a case of routing a USB cable for my phone and routing the mic cable which were straight forward. It's been a pain but glad it's now in and working. Hope it helps someone else.
Just for the benefit of anyone who finds this thread and has similar problems, this is how it was resolved in the end.
I had two problems.
First problems was that the enbabler dongle thing, despite being bought new from Dension themselves, needed to be updated. That's a bit annoying in itself but more challenging was the fact that you need a pc running windows 7 or older and 32bit version at that. The latter is not documented anywhere that I have seen but caused much confusion! So after several hours of windows reinstalls on an olde laptop, the enabler tool was updated. It then worked okay, it seemed with the light on it turning green after doing its things, which it hadn't done before the update.
Next problem was that although I could see that bluetooth was now enabled on the idrive, there was still no sign of a CD changer.
Again, something that I haven't seen documented anywhere by Dension but I'd read somewhere else was that there was a possibility that the MOST cable might not be looped from the factory. My car has no bluetooth, nav or CD changer but did have CD prep. In my example, it terms out that the CD prep onward cable never loops back to CCC. I found this out by taking the CCC out and directly connecting the MOST cables that came with the Dension unit to the CCC and eureka, the Dension then appeared on the iDrive.
Next problem was that to install the dension in the glove box (which I wanted to do), the MOST cables supplied are too short. So I made the two MOST cables supplied by Dension into one long one and then used one of the existing MOST cables from the CD changer prep, making sure I'd identified which is which first.
After that, it was just a case of routing a USB cable for my phone and routing the mic cable which were straight forward. It's been a pain but glad it's now in and working. Hope it helps someone else.
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