I think my car swore at me

[old bob]

Driving back from the coast yesterday I got the bong and the trip meter went out as well as the drive letters ED on switching off the strip between the milage and the drive leters something similar to this %?%#%%% etc. what is the cause? Can any one help

[Gabe]

Out of that entire sentence, I only understood bong, which seems like a possible cause for the problem, just kidding. Sounds serious.... perhaps some sort of module needs to be replaced?

[ThoreauHD]

Mine just burnt out last week. It's called a check control module and it's 95 bucks used and 190 new. Really a coincidence. I smelled a circuit fry when mine went out. Distictive smell- like a motherboard frying.

Used:

http://data.bmrparts.com/bmwparts/1199.html

New:

http://bmaparts.com/

[CharlesAFerg]

Pwnt.

Sorry, I had to.

[ThoreauHD]

Charles is such a kidder.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y106/toasty0z/powned.jpg

[shadowpuck]

I fought part of the problem in the original post. Our E34 would display rapidly changing garbage across the information bar of the instrument cluster. Sometimes it would work alright, and at times it appeared to be going through a test pattern.

What I finally had to do was replace the LCD module - which was done most cheaply by buying a complete instrument cluster from a junkyard. I then mixed/matched parts between the two clusters to get a working unit....