About ebay's ELM327 (szhid seller & others)

**luichi24h** · 08-25-2008, 09:11 AM

Hi,
i am new user and I would like to read OBDII data of my Mazda car. I've seen the "cheap" ELM327 scanners in ebay (the one of china), but I don't know...
Has anyone tried these kind of scanners and do they work? I need some comments of those who bought this stuff. Is it reliable?

I want to develop my own application in C# to get some data (only rpm, speed, and some temperature and pressure data) using this kind of device. Has anyone tried some programming (C#, VB, ....) with ELM327 and is it worth doing this?

Thank you all for your help.

**Sonicxtacy02** · 08-25-2008, 09:38 AM

i bought one of the ebay cheepies and it works just fine. The main problem is lack of a NICE software package.

**DigitalVampire** · 08-25-2008, 09:53 AM

I have purchased one from szhid and it has been reliable so far.

But I guess the chip used is not exactly ELM327. The ELM chip itself costs more than the ebay price of the kit.

It must be some different firmware or a hacked ELM327 firmware...

The good news is that it all works.

**mezz64** · 08-25-2008, 12:50 PM

I've got an ebay interface from szhid as well. I've been using the elm VB6 class that a fellow mp3car member posted a while back to make a RR plugin and things have been working fine.

**DaveDog** · 08-25-2008, 12:59 PM

????

Did I hear RR plugin for ELM327 ???

**tolisn** · 08-25-2008, 02:10 PM

Originally Posted by mezz64

I've got an ebay interface from szhid as well. I've been using the elm VB6 class that a fellow mp3car member posted a while back to make a RR plugin and things have been working fine.

It would be great if we had a RR plugin for thew elm. Care to share it with us ???

**mezz64** · 08-25-2008, 03:27 PM

Originally Posted by DaveDog

????

Did I hear RR plugin for ELM327 ???

Originally Posted by tolisn

It would be great if we had a RR plugin for thew elm. Care to share it with us ???

At the moment it's purely for MPG calculations and it's still got a few bugs to be worked out. It wouldn't be difficult for it to display other data though. I wasn't going to post up anything until I got things working correctly consistently, but if there it enough interest I might post up something sooner.

**zimbu** · 08-25-2008, 07:49 PM

I too got an ebay interface from szhid.
Just a few minutes ago I got done replacing my input speed sensor
based on the codes i retrieved through this unit.
It works great.

Zimbu

**Lukeyson** · 08-26-2008, 07:11 AM

The eBay clone supports all the basic commands. But it doesn't support high speeds.

The ELM327 has onchip support for most protocols, and does USB off-chip. This ELM327 clone does USB on-chip but has external chips for all the OBD protocols.

They advertise it as ELM327 1.2a. But it's the circuit board that is version 1.2a and that has nothing to do with the ELM.

Also, I see that the ELM327 1.3 is out now.

Lukeyson

**HiJackZX1** · 08-27-2008, 12:56 PM

I tried the EBAY version from China also. i used it 2 times and after that it said that this USB device has malfunctioned and will not work. After battling with the thing for god knows how long, I cut my loses and bought one from obdpros.com. I also decided to go with serial version rather then USB, since i have 4 serial ports at my desposal.