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I have the “Torque” app($5) that works with the bluetooth OBDII scanners. I bought a higher priced OBDii to bluetooth adaptor “PLX Kiwi 2” (Looks like $39.99 now?) I don’t think I needed that more costly one, but I was afraid the <$10 ones might not work correctly? It works good for getting codes and displaying sensor values. You can clear the codes, but it does not let you change parameters like a professional diagnostic computer. The Torque app also lets you setup the phone as a gauge cluster, and has GPS speed, so you can display the OBDII speed next to the GPS speed to see if the OBDII (speedometer) speed is off because of wrong size tires or gear change.
If you are into filming in-car video with your cell phone, it had a "track recorder" that videos while you drive and you can display the OBDII data in the video, and even have a map overlay of your location and street your on.The idea for my comment comes from you pointing out how inexpensive these tools are becoming. My “what if” scenario. What if the law was changed to allow the cop that pulled you over to scan your car and see if it was emission compliant and if it was not a tow was instigated? My feeling is that we are getting bit in the behind just as much as we are being helped by technology.
I have the BlueDriver by Lemur. At $100 from Amazon.com it’s not one of the lowest priced versions but is is an excellent scan tool. My co-worker’s Nissan Xterra died and had to tow it to a shop. The shop told him what was wrong and gave him a price of $2200 to fix it. I went over scanned it and it listed repair suggestions. It was his cat converters were clogged and the O2 sensors were failing. I replaced those with aftermarket parts and costed him $600 and now it runs fine.
Hello delwyn. I ask if the mileage or time was over 8 years or 80,000 miles (easy to be out of time/mileage) as cat converters have a longer than factory warranty (I just posted about this). I imagine with clogged converters the manufacture would try and deny warranty anyway by citing a condition that was not fixed and shortened the life of the “cat”.
It was a 1996 or 1998 with over 156,000 miles. I told him what may be wrong and he purchased the parts. I just did the diagnosis and labor. He bought it from NAPA and I was going to order it from Rock Auto or an online Nissan parts dealer. He didn’t want to take it to the dealer so we did the repairs ourselves plus his cousin owned the NAPA franchise so he got the parts cheap. Thanks for the tip and I read somewhere it was a lifetime warranty on exhaust parts namely the cat converter but not sure.
I have used 2 myself, a cheap ELM clone, (the tiny translucent blue one with a tab on the connector) and an OBDLink MX. The cheap one worked for the most part but had issues on GM vehicles, mainly that it would not communicate at all with ’00s models and on some ’90s models there were certain PIDs that would crash and reboot the PCM causing the engine to stall if at idle and stumble if above idle.
The MX is far from perfect also, it works with everything that I have plugged it into so far but has locked up a couple times and had to be power cycled by unplugging it. Also it can only be paired with 2 devices at a time so I have to re-pair it every time I switch devices.Either way the info that can be obtained varies wildly with what vehicle you are in, a 3.6l 5th gen Chrysler van has PIDs galore, some others have very few. My favorite PIDs though are fuel trims and the GM specific ones like misfire history, knock retard and oil life percent. KR is great as it tells you if you need to use a higher octane rating fuel.
Also be aware that Bluetooth devices will not work with an Apple iOS device as iOS doesn’t allow Bluetooth SPP (serial port protocol).
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