I just placed an order for an ELM327 based OBD2 to RS232 Scantool from here: http://www.obdallinone.com. It was about the cheapest version of the ELM327 scanners I could find.

After exchange rate and shipping costs, paypal gave me a dollar value of about $165AUD.

When it turns up I'll grab some of the known compatible software products and see what values I can read out of my BA XR8.



Lukeyson

Last edited by Lukeyson on Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Oh, and post my results up here of course.....


Lukeyson

Good buy!! I look forward to hearing of the results.

Be carefull, we have a generic OBDII scan tool at work and we have to use an adaptor for the AU and BA's. It seems that although the plug is the same shape, the pin designations are different from normal OBDII.

Bugger, i have had a obd ll scan tool for a couple of years.Only just picked up my RTV and tied it out on it and it would not connect.Any chance of finding out which one they changed around.How can they say obd ll and they change things around.Like putting badge on something and trying to pass it off as something else.

OK, received delivery today.

Thanks for the warning.

Will play with it over the weekend.


Lukeyson

Hi smally351, next time your using the work scan tool.Write down what the pins are in the in and what comes out the other side.Tried mine again today.Pin 4 is a earth, pin 16 is 12v and pin 7 is data (K line?).Now we may need a L line which would be pin 15, but pin 15 is not used on the Ford obd plug Mmmmmm.Which one are they using??

BA's use the CAN bus meaning alot of the wiring including diagnostics are different...

BF'S are supposed to be OBDll

The ELM327 is capable of reading both the CAN and ISO buses that the BA uses. I hadn't expected a difference in pinouts.

As it turns out i probably won't have time this weekend to give it a run, but it won't be too long.

I've also taken the time to download a few of the free software tools are available.


Lukeyson

I recieved my AutoEnginuity scan tool back from the US this week after its CAN upgrade.Tried it today in the car and its a goer.Giving basic manifold pressure, temps etc.,Only thing missing was the Falcon from their list of Fords

wikid. I want one. At my old work where they did a s**t load of work of falcons (mostly commonwhores though) they didnt have one. WTF

Heck, I haven't been here for awhile.

I had given up on using the ELM327 as a tool for being able to retrain the BEM. Now I'm just interested in being able to read or set ANY of the Ford PIDS as listed in the workshop manual. To be honest, I didn't really test it much, and my hopes at the time of doing an MCC to ACC conversion and not having to visit Ford were Dashed when I priced out the upgrade using new parts. Since then FTG have rekindled my desire, but I know now the ELM327 retrain option is out altogether.

Somehow, I need to find a way to map the PID listed into their appropriate hex values, and which custom mode I need to access them. Not an easy task when that information is proprietary.

If anyone knows of anyone that has information that could lead to the decoding of Ford Oz PIDS then I'd be all ears.


Lukeyson

OK, just played again to check the MIssus SX terri to see if it had any codes. All DTC's are clear, good.

I just had a run with 3 programs:

* Scanmaster ELM Demo 1.4.0.0 from www.dgsoft.de
* Easy OBD II 2.1
* OBD-DIAG 1.1

Scanmaster looks the most comprehensive, but many of the features were locked out of the Demo. It does have access to many of the Mode 01 PIDS by the looks of it (about 90) - I just don't think the BA/SX uses that many of them. I have a feeling that the BA/SX uses a lot of Mode 22 PIDS which are custom parameters - stuff that's outside of the J1979 predefined Modes 00 to 09

Easy OBD is just that - easy. Many of the basics are there, but it's not flash.

OBD-DIAG is there to show off to your mates on the Premium ICC screen - fancy graphical displays of operating parameters. However, some things weren't reading right - like Manifold pressure and Fuel Pressure. So it's not perfect.

I'll do my best to take some screenshots over the weekend.


Lukeyson

I managed to find a copy of Digimoto 4.03a up on isohunt that works with the ELM chips. It is by far the best bit of software so far.

As far as mandated J1979 codes go, the BA Falcon shows quite a few of the first 32, but misses out on a couple that might be handy. As for the Enhanced Mode 01 PIDS above Hex20 - no go. Not supported. I have, however, seen quite a bit of data from doing Functional requests to random dual-byte PIDS in mode 22, so I may be onto something. Thing is, only ECU #1 responds to anything, which I suspect is the PCM.

And so far I haven't found a program with a 'Dashboard' that lets me remove the items that I can't monitor in the BA.

The biggest hurdle right now for me is that while it is cheap, I can only get this scanner to go at 38400bps. Not so bad for the older stuff, but on a BA Falcon the CAN bus is an 11bit system running at 500kbs - so that makes updates slower than you'd want and means the CAN bus can overflow the ELM327 quite easily - especially when I go into 'monitor all' mode.

I have just finished extracting the PIDS and DTC's from the BA workshop manual. The DTC's are useful because they adhere to a standard. But the PID's are pretty much proprietary Ford. The manual only gives me the text values, and i'm on the hunt to try and find the Mode 22 hex values for many of those For Enhanced PIDS. It's hard, but I have a few leads.

Also, there's a bunch of data that's broadcast in the clear straight onto the CAN bus. The PCM and BEM chatting to the IC, the BEM chatting to the HIM, bla bla bla.

For example, rather than use slow J1979 Mode 01 queries to find road speed and RPM, much of the real-time data is already broadcast between the PCM and the Instrument Cluster and is just ripe for me to filter and pluck. I have many of the Broadcast items direct form the workshop manual, and am about to embark on some long-winded reverse engineering of broadcast bitstreams to see what different values I can see. I've already located the bit patterns for the doors opening, but I've got a long way to go to get the rest.

Thankfully I have both a BA V8 MCC 5 Speed and an SX I6 Auto ACC, and a mate at work with a BF I6T 6-speed MCC so I have access to a variety of codes.

This has somehow kept me absolutely mesmerised as I figure out how everything comes together - and has actually been more fun than I care to admit.


Lukeyson