This cost me £10.49 inc shipping from eBay, which seemed very reasonable. My unit came in good condition with the connector plug attached and some decent length tails on it.
As far as I can tell the pedal has two position sensors that each take an input voltage and return a signal. I’m not sure if it is resistive or digital at the moment so I’m going to try putting it on a multimeter….
I found the pin out information on a forum post on a racing simulator site of all places:
- Pin 1: GND 1 – Brown/Yellow (apparently brown and green on the E46 pedal)
- Pin 2: GND 2 – Brown
- Pin 3: VCC 2 – Yellow/Green
- Pin 4: SIG 1 – White
- Pin 5: VCC 1 – Yellow
- Pin 6: SIG 2 – White (apparently white/green on the E46)
A bit of googling suggests the electronics expect 5V on a modern BMW so I hooked this up to the bench power supply and a multimeter and took some voltage readings (i.e. 5V to VCC 1, Ground and multimeter ground to GND 1, and multimeter to SIG 1, then repeat for SIG 2). My bench power supply is actually an old PC PSU (I do love to recycle) so it isn’t adjustable and doesn’t give me exactly 5V. Measured at 5.13V while testing. Here are the results:
SIG 1
- Throttle at rest: 0.73V
- Throttle at full travel: 4.00V
SIG 2
- Throttle at rest: 0.36V
- Throttle at full travel: 2.02V
So, the output of SIG 1 has exactly twice the resolution of SIG 2. Guess there are two for safety reasons? [this website confirms that]. Either way I now know how to get the output of my throttle and feed it to the inverter control board.
Note on the connector: It’s a Tyco unit but there are nice cheap clones available on AliExpress again – search for 967616.
Fitting the pedal to the Z3
I created a 3D printed adaptor to allow the 1-Series pedal to bolt into the Z3. This should also work on an E36 (let me know if not). You can access the original design files on Fusion360 here, or download the two STL parts here.