I figured I'd share this, as there's quite a few people that do/have messed with k-can stuff on these cars: You can retrofit a used e60/e65 night vision set up, provided that both the camera and controller come from the same donor car (they're coded to each other due to ITAR) and you add an arduino that will send the donor car vin number over can bus to the night vision controller.
Parts:
66549164992 Night vision controller
66549167255 Night vision camera, hopefully with the bracket
61316946321 Headlight switch with night vision button (and hud)
61138373632 Connector for the camera
61130005199 6x pins for the camera connector
61138364666 18 pol connector for the night vision controller (AMP 1-963616-1) - tons of bmws use them
61138364662 Cap thingy with lever for the connector above
Grabbing as much off this off a donor car saves a bunch of time, especially if you don't have to make the wiring from scratch. I ended up using a shielded CAT6 to run the wiring to the camera, as far as I can tell the OEM retrofit kit is NLA.
The night vision retrofit pdf is actually really awesome for pinouts and what not, though I ended up running the cat6 through the ecu box to save time. It end up popping up right next to the night vision controller and kgm, sorta under the glove box.
Now for the fun stuff: the night vision camera will throw a code and disable itself when it receives 0x380 k-can message that encodes the last 7 digits of your vin as ascii hex values, because it doesn't match the donor car. So what you can do is add an Arduino that listens for the same message, clears the code on the night vision controller and then sends another 0x380 message that encodes the donor car Vin. Once the controller is in enabled state, it doesn't seem to care if there any more 0x380 messages coming across the wire.
If there's more interest, I can dump out the source code for the arduino; there's some nuance in sending the messages in a way that doesn't upset your car.
Parts:
66549164992 Night vision controller
66549167255 Night vision camera, hopefully with the bracket
61316946321 Headlight switch with night vision button (and hud)
61138373632 Connector for the camera
61130005199 6x pins for the camera connector
61138364666 18 pol connector for the night vision controller (AMP 1-963616-1) - tons of bmws use them
61138364662 Cap thingy with lever for the connector above
Grabbing as much off this off a donor car saves a bunch of time, especially if you don't have to make the wiring from scratch. I ended up using a shielded CAT6 to run the wiring to the camera, as far as I can tell the OEM retrofit kit is NLA.
The night vision retrofit pdf is actually really awesome for pinouts and what not, though I ended up running the cat6 through the ecu box to save time. It end up popping up right next to the night vision controller and kgm, sorta under the glove box.
Now for the fun stuff: the night vision camera will throw a code and disable itself when it receives 0x380 k-can message that encodes the last 7 digits of your vin as ascii hex values, because it doesn't match the donor car. So what you can do is add an Arduino that listens for the same message, clears the code on the night vision controller and then sends another 0x380 message that encodes the donor car Vin. Once the controller is in enabled state, it doesn't seem to care if there any more 0x380 messages coming across the wire.
If there's more interest, I can dump out the source code for the arduino; there's some nuance in sending the messages in a way that doesn't upset your car.
