Quote: Originally Posted by carabuser
and your suggestion as to the protocol to use would be... ?
AFAIK, scantool.net uses same rs-232. So what would be "better equipment out there" in the same price range?
For $200 my company sells the
Mongoose ISO/CAN interface. The host interface is full-speed USB (12mbps) with full electrical isolation. It has a 32-bit ARM processor with plenty of buffer space so it doesn't lose packets. The device driver meets the
J2534 standard so it's compatible with most
controller reflash software. It's the higher-end of the price range, but you get what you pay for.
For fifty bucks less, the
ELM is literally ~100 times slower (9600 baud). It uses a PIC with only a 256 byte message buffer, so expect a lot of dropped packets. Even though it's popular, the serial wire-protocol is proprietary and there's no J2534 driver. None of the implementations I've seen are electrically isolated -- better hope there's never a voltage spike that would kill your laptop's port.