Electrical Wiring Question, help please

[DUCTTAPE]

Hi

I attempted to do some electrical add-on's to my new MCSC. Some worked, others, eh

1st: Spliced the phone onto the cig lighter cable. Neutral to brown, hot to the striped wire. The phone works, but there is now no power to the cig lighter (after the splice), and anything I splice DOWN WIRE from the cell phone has no power also.

Then, I tried wiring fogs and (actually, not yet) driving lights.

Both are attached at the lamps, relay grounded and the hot screwed directly to the battery terminal point along side the air filter. The business ends I got thru the fire wall.

I read in the schematic that yellow/brown is the wire out of the center switch console for the fogs. So I spliced MY fogs into this. (Actually, this is a hot wire that meets the lamps at the on/off switch, supposed to be mounted on the dash. I was tring to avoid this switch and have the lamps on when the oem lamps are switched on.) Nothing. I then spliced it into what I think is the factory harness for the driving lights, to the left of the steering column and below the dash. Here, I was going to use the lamps on/off switch.

Nothing there either.

I haven't tried the driving lights because of the two earlier problems.

Any suggestions? Namely:

Can I splice the fogs into the oem dash board toggle?

Where can I find a switched hot wire under the dash? If I splice in fogs, driving, radar, etc, will I draw too much current from it and dim whatever is on the other end of it?

Thanks for your help

d

PS, the lamps are the Alta kit. IPF, I think is the name. That bracket is smoking. These lamps are NOT going to move!)

[SteveM3]

If you are going to do any electrical connections you may be better off buying a Bentley
Service Manual. The Mini uses 4 bus systems, K-bus, CAN-bus, D-bus and DS2-bus.
What may seem to be a hot wire can be a bus and any connections are likely to screw
it up. I notice one of the wires you used was yellow/brown. You may well have connected
to the CAN-bus and will be altering signals which will give you weird electrical faults. The
CAN-bus uses twisted pairs, either yellow/brown or yellow/black. For any lighting the
nearer the actual bulb you get the more likely you have a hot wire and not a bus. I've
learned the hard way not to guess but to use the manual. You may also want to search
for these topics as wiring for extra lights has been dealt with on many occasions.

[DUCTTAPE]

Thanks,

I actually have a Bentley, which is how I knew it was yellow/brown. Someone on NEMINI.org board suggested the wires out of the switch panel are elctronic, not electric. Anyway, somehow or other, I now have the lamps at least wired to an (unswitched) line. I need to find a switched one because the on/off switched draw a tad of power.

Anyone know of a hot, switched wire under the dash?

thx

d

[JoeDentist]

People assume that the toggle switches are actual toggle switches carrying 12 volts, but they are not. They are actually "dummy" toggles that press upon hall effect switches on a PCB below them, so they are closer to keyboard entries than toggle switches. These toggles just send very low current signals to the computer, which then turns on a circuit somewhere else to power a function.

If you want to get at switched battery cutrrent level connections, your best bet is a fuse tap out of the fuse panel under the hood next to the battery terminal box (in an MCS).