12v battery monitor

[808Pants]

Mine have always pivoted slightly with some effort. Never been an issue yet.
Not sure what this "horn" is you refer to.
If you want to check to see if the battery is Original to the car, see this pic on what to look for:

If the 4-digit stamp is not there, it is a replacement battery and there will be a round date sticker someplace else.
If the 4-digit stamp IS there, you need to get rid of that battery ASAP

Thanks Evi3 for taking the trouble to post the photos. I'll check out the date code - also need to get familiar with data reported by new BM2 monitor. I didn't suspect there was any problem with the battery coming into this, just wanted to be prepared for the inevitable.

In your photo, the terminal nuts are hex (10mm nut as I think you mentioned in a previous post) as are mine - though mine are on a 45-degree slant, with the slice through the lug occurring along a diagonal/helix, not like any old-school lug I've ever seen (see photo below). In the next post, Simoni3 mentions he's "lost a couple of torx bits" in the process of swapping out batteries, so is it an attractive option to unscrew from the center of the lugs instead, where there is indeed a Torx bolt? I'm wondering now if the pivoting I'm feeling is around the Torx bolt, as Alohart suggested - seems likely, really.

Do the brass bits come with OEM battery? Looking online at the range of replacements, it looks like those boys need to get together and come to some kind of agreement to standardize their lugs - they're all over the map: flat with hole, tapered, side-tap and top-tap without anything removable, etc.

The brass "horn" I mentioned is circled in the photo. You might also be able to inadvertently see something about the battery genesis - I took this terrible shot not for that, but to see what the h was going on where I couldn't see, to possibly explain why my lug remained a little pivot-y.

I took it off again after this shot, also because I didn't like the BM2 spade terminal potentially wandering out of the battery terminal's nut reach (as seen in photo), and moved it to the back side where it would be beneath another (ring) terminal - but didn't find any improvement in the wiggle-ability of the lug.
With traditional battery lugs, if you didn't pay a little attention to getting them fully seated on the tapered posts before tightening, you could run out of thread before they were really snug (or the lead would just mash up from overtightening, so further tightening would only compound the problem). I'm pretty sure mine was seated before tightening, but it's a terrible place to try to see anything while my hands can't even find room to get in there. Honestly I didn't even see the Torx fasteners while working on this.

 

[chinesederek]

I really like this product

Could you please give me details of how you installed this unit to your i3.

 

[EvanstonI3]

Could you please give me details of how you installed this unit to your i3.

It just gets attached to the 12v battery terminals. Then you use an app to connect to it via Bluetooth using your phone

 

[808Pants]

I still don't know how it got my Bluetooth connection, but it did. In hindsight, it seems like anyone passing by could just as well have ended up connected. It's the opposite of my usual problem.

 

[EvanstonI3]

I still don't know how it got my Bluetooth connection, but it did. In hindsight, it seems like anyone passing by could just as well have ended up connected. It's the opposite of my usual problem.

but they would need to have the Battery Monitor app installed to connect and view the info.

 

[808Pants]

1) so if I buy a second BM2 and install it on another vehicle, how will it (or I) know which is being monitored?

2) why does the app keep nagging me to "turn on Bluetooth?" This is especially confusing because Bluetooth is already on when it's asking, and as I wrote earlier, it didn't need me to pair it to begin with. On first installing, I kept getting hung during the "get it to talk to my phone" process (which I can't clearly recall now). I spent a long time wondering and looking online for how to get this to happen, unable to find anything that seemed it might be the BM2 device in my list of Bluetooth devices, returned to the vehicle at some point, and it had magically connected. It's recording my data and transmitting to my iPhone already, so...

3) is the consensus that those downward spikes (first post here) in the voltage plot can be ignored (some of which, in my case, dip very close to 12.0V)?

 

[tongsli]

1) so if I buy a second BM2 and install it on another vehicle, how will it (or I) know which is being monitored?

2) why does the app keep nagging me to "turn on Bluetooth?" This is especially confusing because Bluetooth is already on when it's asking, and as I wrote earlier, it didn't need me to pair it to begin with. On first installing, I kept getting hung during the "get it to talk to my phone" process (which I can't clearly recall now). I spent a long time wondering and looking online for how to get this to happen, unable to find anything that seemed it might be the BM2 device in my list of Bluetooth devices, returned to the vehicle at some point, and it had magically connected. It's recording my data and transmitting to my iPhone already, so...

3) is the consensus that those downward spikes (first post here) in the voltage plot can be ignored (some of which, in my case, dip very close to 12.0V)?

I am still ignoring the blips. The overall voltage trend is 13.0 it's still doing the dip but it doesn't last. I don't know the answer to your two BM2's question but am interested in the answer.

 

[billvjohn]

The manufacturer of this battery monitor, under various model names, has been collecting real time location data from 100k+ users around the world. Their app runs "persistently" on devices in the background sending location data to China. https://doubleagent.net/

 

[tongsli]

The manufacturer of this battery monitor, under various model names, has been collecting real time location data from 100k+ users around the world. Their app runs "persistently" on devices in the background sending location data to China. https://doubleagent.net/

Bimmercode is also collecting personal data

https://bimmercode.app/privacy/

https://www.mybmwi3.com/help/privacy-policy/

 

[808Pants]

I don't have anything to report regarding my oh-so-fascinating life being tracked by the Chinese...but I did finally get a semi-understandable response from the Amazon vendor (and manufacturer), "iKiKin," regarding my wish to monitor two or more batteries in different vehicles or devices.

I give you...the BM-6. It's about $2 more than the BM-2, so I don't know why they don't just phase out the BM-2 in favor of this (hey! they could then track my wife's car, as well as my loader and excavator...and the old tree-chipper up the hill).

I also still don't know how it's connecting to my iPhone without being represented as a Bluetooth item, but it's doing it somehow. (It still keeps begging me to turn it on in Bluetooth...)

Anyway, my BM-2 is just barely within the return-for-credit period with Amazon, so I'm going to replace it with the BM-6, and ordered a second one of them to test out as a second-vehicle monitor.

If you want to take a look - BM-6 has an ASIN of‎ B0CSNKDKQQ

Dave

 

[tongsli]

I don't have anything to report regarding my oh-so-fascinating life being tracked by the Chinese...but I did finally get a semi-understandable response from the Amazon vendor (and manufacturer), "iKiKin," regarding my wish to monitor two or more batteries in different vehicles or devices.

I give you...the BM-6. It's about $2 more than the BM-2, so I don't know why they don't just phase out the BM-2 in favor of this (hey! they could then track my wife's car, as well as my loader and excavator...and the old tree-chipper up the hill).

I also still don't know how it's connecting to my iPhone without being represented as a Bluetooth item, but it's doing it somehow. (It still keeps begging me to turn it on in Bluetooth...)

Anyway, my BM-2 is just barely within the return-for-credit period with Amazon, so I'm going to replace it with the BM-6, and ordered a second one of them to test out as a second-vehicle monitor.

If you want to take a look - BM-6 has an ASIN of‎ B0CSNKDKQQ

Dave

thanks for posting the update!