[cmichaelo]

Originally Posted by MechE

My 1M also had power seats before installing the AMX seats.

My goal was to disassemble my factory seats as little as possible.

The cleanest answer I found as to buy two used seat control modules on eBay for about $30 each. I was able to find the exact part number that matched the modules on my existing seats. I then removed the yellow connector "shell" from the old seats and reassembled it on the AMX seats. The connector shell holds multiple "Tetris like" connector ends that are attached to the harnesses from the new seat. You do not need to cut any wires.

Unfortunately, this is where my memory is failing. I believe I had extra power seat wiring harnesses that I needed to fill slots in the yellow connector shell. Most of the connectors on this harness aren't connected to anything. Part numbers 61129219007
and 61129218748.

I was not able to get the small brown boxes for non-power seats to work with my seat heaters.

The parallel fuse like connector is for the seat position sensor that disables the airbag when the seat is all the way forward. It is a hall effect sensor that is triggered by a magnet attached to the front of the factory seat rail. I suggest removing the sensor from your old seat and tie wrapping it up under the new seat. It just needs to be connected to not trigger the SRS light.

I still needed to code out the seat occupancy sensor, but the seat heaters and airbags worked perfectly.

I hope that helps.

Thanks for the feedback. That was very useful and it confirms and ties off some of the loose ends and thoughts I had about that fkin' harness tree. Not exactly plug'n-play as AMX advertises.

One of the things I was contemplating was to get that brown box (this one). But not only is it an insane $370 x 2 = $ $740... wtf!!!... but if there's a possibility that it won't work with the circuitry of car equipped with power seats, as it sounds like you had a problem with, then I'm gonna totally drop this thought right now and reuse the bigger gray distribution box from the stock seat.

Ok, so in order to remove the existing main harness tree (ie, the one that slides into the yellow socket shell and has like 9-10 additional end points/plugs), I had to open up the long plastic cover on the side of seat where all the control buttons are.

After doing that I decided to trace where that "parallel fuse connector on top of the yellow socket shell" connects to... and it ends up inside the headrest. I suspect it must be the "active headrest" feature, which I didn't even knew I had. But I'm pretty sure I don't need it.

I plan to code out the following sensors/actuators:
- Active headrest sensor/actuator (or whatever it's called)
- Seat occupancy sensor (ie, that sounds the alarm and disables airbag)
- Seat position sensor (ie, that disables the airbag if seat is too far forwards)