Just did my retrofit from Bimmertech. Got my kit in 2 days, and that's them sending it from Poland! to AZ. I did though get an invoice from DHL after 2 weeks saying i have to pay an additional $20 in taxes.
Now on to the product..
It's fairly easy to install if you know how to connect things or if you worked with something like this before. The manual leaves much to be desired, so i had to find things myself. The directions from bimmertech include a picture that's floating around this thread (which seems for a different model although its still a good reference) along with a few pdfs on how to remove parts of the car, the rest is up to you to figure out what you need and how it all goes together. I wish it would have at least a basic written tutorial since the unit is very feature rich and you can hook up all sorts of things to it..
I was able to find a full english manual for the unit that explains things a little better here:
http://qdis.co.kr/wp-content/uploads...5_Portrait.pdf
The whole thing took 4 hours to install mainly because of guess work on what's needed to connect and what doesn't (a long with troubleshooting bad connection i had), the unit also has 2 options of connecting the back up camera to confuse you and even supports PDC.
Here is a picture of what you actually need to connect if you just want the camera working:
The dip switches dont have to be changed, unless you have a small screen in which case change 5 to on. Make sure 7 is on, that's to enable the back up camera. Other switches disable the additional video inputs (more on switches is in the manual above). Of course you can hook up things to video inputs if you want (you can have 3 composite RCA connections you can use). The IR sensor is not necessary but the kit comes with a remote and you can change a few settings (like position of guiding lines, brightness etc). The whole thing works out of the box without any tinkering or changing the settings. You can switch video sources using your idrive controller or even the 8 button on your dash (so IR sensor and remote are not really needed). But i did install the IR sensor into the glove box just in case.
Installation:- take off the front paneling (guide is here: ) and you can just pull off the front trim with your hands.
- plug the wires as shown in diagram, and splice in the power and CAN (red, black, and CAN-low, Can-high). The kit has wire clamps which work ok for small CAN wires (some times they don't clamp in all the way in, and i ended up spending 1 hr trouble shooting it, i then clamped them in twice to make sure and that fixed the bad connection). You will probably have to splice in manually into the power wires because the power that goes into the main unit is to fat to use the clamps (or you can find other place to tap it into)
- install the camera into the trunk, then run the wire through the passenger side (you will have to remove the pillar trims too). This whole process takes about an hour and is probably the longest part of the whole thing.
- no need to connect power to the camera directly it will get power from the unit (even though there are 2 cryptic wires sticking out of the camera, those are not used and are there to confuse you)
- there are also camera wires that are sticking out of the power connector that comes from the unit (REAR-C, SAFE, F-CAM-DET) don't worry about those either, since we are hooking up the camera through the CAN interface those are not used.
- - the unit is pretty big so i was able to stash it on the left behind the power-on ignition button, you can slide it into that space from the left side after you take out your main unit (There is hole there that's just big enough for you to slide it in there). Behind the glovebox should work too, but you would have to take out the glove box.
There you go, you are all set and done!
The one problem i do have and maybe someone on here knows how to fix it (but i doubt that it's fixable without replacing the camera). Is that i have 2 parking line sets. Dynamic and Static. I would like to keep just the dynamic ones since they change with the steering wheel position. I can't however figure out a way to turn off the static ones, i think they are built into the camera itself. This sucks because i spent the extra $200 on the bimmertech kit because it was the only one with dynamic parking lines that make it look like OEM camera.. maybe it was just a mistake on their part and they sent me the wrong camera module.
Here is the picture of how it looks below so you can see what i mean.
PDF manual for the unit:
QPI_BM12_MAIN_EN_130625_Portrait.pdf
Hope this helps someone else who decides to undergo this task and maybe can point out how i can remove the ugly static lines.