[Bavees]

Hello,

I have a weird intermittent issue which I believe stems from my instrument cluster doing some kind of reset.

Vehicle is a 2017 G30 530i. Originally from Canada, imported to Europe in 2022 by a previous owner.

It started with service intervals randomly expiring and showing unrealistic dates (expired back in 2001).
The intervals that expired were brake fluid, vehicle check and vehicle inspection (all stored in the kombi afaik). Engine oil interval which is is reset via the DME remains fine and never has any issues.

The above assumption is based on the way they can be reset via Tool32 where only oil is done via DME and the rest are in KOMBI.

I lived with it for a few weeks trying to reset it via the cluster, ISTA and Tool32 but they kept on expiring in a seemingly random manner.

In parallel I decided I'm not a fan of the HUD and turned it off via the iDrive menu and one morning as I got in the car and the service intervals popped up again I noticed the HUD was suddenly on again.
Since that point I tried to intentionally change time from analog to digital and set dash display to individual and notice that each time my service intervals expire all of my personal settings related to the cluster are also getting reset to factory defaults. But everything else is fine, no other settings get lost.

So I'm thinking both must somehow be related. I tried to check if there is a newer istep version but when when I did TAL calculation in ISTA no new files appeared.
I then also tried to edit my SVT_ist to change the SWFL,BTLD and CAFD file versions to trick esys into thinking a newer version exists and rewriting them. Coding worked fine, all coded parameters were lost as expected. But the issue remains.

The only fix I've found so far is to disable the display of brake fluid and vehicle check via esys by setting:

CBS_STATUS_BRFL
and
CBS_STATUS_FZGCHK_DEPEND
to "sperre"

Now both no longer show up and no longer expire. I was however unable to find a parameter to disable the vehicle inspection, so did it via ISTA+ but seems it does it in a non permanent way because next time my cluster settings reset the vehicle inspection re-enabled itself and reported it had expired in 2021.

I've tried to compare cafd files before and after disabling the check via ISTA but there are no differences which reinforces that it seems to just "check a box" somewhere that isn't user accessible but doesn't actually do any permanent coding.
While I can live with the cluster settings resetting because other than not being a big fan of the HUD the rest of my settings are left on the defaults anyway and I can set the HUD to a quick button and turn it off even if it's mildly annoying. The expiring service interval is infuriating though.

Has anyone run into something similar and does anyone have any ideas of what more I could try to do?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Bavees]

issue got solved with the help of a greta guy from the binmerscene forum.

issue was: a can filter was installed behind the kombi. After removal all issues are gone

[lanlilan]

Originally Posted by Bavees

issue was: a can filter was installed behind the kombi. After removal all issues are gone

What is a can filter, behind the kombi?

[Bavees]

Originally Posted by lanlilan

What is a can filter, behind the kombi?

I don't have very good understanding of what they are or how they work but as far as I know its a device that will basically alter/filter the CAN data coming into (maybe also out of?) the cluster.
From what I could find online there are two types. One being a mileage blocker which completely prevents mileage from increasing in the cluster, the other is a filter which seems like it only alters the data so that for example if you drive 100 miles the cluster will only register 80 (or w.e alteration percentage/ratio is designed to provide).

Whats strange in my case is that clearly some device of the sort had been there as I had a male to female connecter that intercepted both the CAN lines coming into the cluster as well as two leftover wires on the positive and ground wires.

So this all seems like there would have been a device and you could unplug the male end of the connecter which held the two original CAN wires plug it into the device and have it do whatever bad stuff its meant to do (usually alter mileage in some way). Then when you dont want to do it anymore you could reconnect the CAN wires directly to the cluster.
However, the power and ground wires in my case led to nothing at all and the can lines technically were just connected via a male/female connector and still went to the correct pins (9 & 10) on the cluster's 12 pin connector.

I therefore can't answer how/why this setup would have out of the blue started to wreak havoc on my cluster but the fact is that I removed it all and just moved back my original CAN wires to the 12 pin connector and everything instantly went away.

My guess is some kind of mileage blocking device would have been there and this aligns with the single strange thing I had on my car:

Our yearly inspection registers mileage and you must by law keep the physical inspection document in the car. So when I went to do my inspection this year (I bought the car 3 months ago) I noticed that last years mileage was only 98k km and this year it had jumped to 178k km. Which is very rare for someone in our end of the world. Everything in Bulgaria is at most 500km away. But I just assumed the guy traveled abroad a lot.
Come to think of it maybe he found that device and when he removed it and reconnected the cluster it got rewritten with the real mileage of the car and he was no longer in possession of a car with less than 100k km but one with almost double and thus promptly sold it.

Or least that's my best guess on what happened.

As to why this suddenly started being a problem now as stated above, I've no clue. Fact is that upon removal all my issues went away.

ps: I also had issues with CAFD file getting corrupted sometime upon the car sleeping or right after coding and today I reached a point where absolutely no form of coding, injecting or manipulating the module would allow the cafd file to save properly without getting corrupted after allowing the car to sleep or rebooting the module.

To whomever it may help the TL : DR is "check behind your cluster for any added devices or wires".