Joey was extremely happy to handle my questions about the Mongoose. I bought one and I think he's right when he's been raving about it being a good product in some of his other posts. It's an extremely clever design, DrewTech's support is great, the material they have published allowed me to get started on a simple application right away without buying any standards or specifications. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone who needs J2534 on a budget.
The Mongoose is powered by the USB bus, not the car. When you plug it in to the computer, you're greeted with a red LED to show it's powered on. It initializes almost immediately and a green LED provides a heartbeat indication, and the red LED indicates bus activity. It's in a clear housing that refracts somewhat, allowing you to see the lights from any angle.
To frame my earlier questions, I'm tinkering with some older BMW electronics. There are actually two K-lines on some of the cars, but they are normally bridged together in the "factory" interface.
I got some jumper wires and even ran diagnostics and data collection on a pre-OBD car. Further, I was able to jumper into the bus that handles communications between the instrument cluster, phone, steering wheel buttons, and radio in my car. After some watching I was able to construct my own packets to manipulate the radio and display arbitrary text on the instrument panel.
I was working with a dumb level converter on the serial port before, and this is a lot easier. This interface adds the checksum to iso9141 messages, for example. I just wish that USB was reliable with longer cables. Looks like I'm putting the garage PC on a cart.
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