Cable and software on ebay

[Jon_E36]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, but if you know epj3, his red e30 was my old car. A few days ago I bought my e36 which I love, and have slowly been sorting a few minor problems out. I have an airbag light on, and the passenger seatbelt receptacle was already half taken apart when I got it, so maybe thats the problem. Anyway while looking on ebay, I came across this. Does anybody have any input as to what you can do?... Does it work on pre obdII cars, what can you view/reset, that sort of thing.
Link

Jon

 

[epj3]

Bump

 

[Kirby]

I know alot more about OBDII than OBDI, but I post the little bit that I know.

OBDI was not as well documented or developed. The EBay ad shows a cable with a small interface to "adjust" the signal levels from the OBDI car connector to standard RS232 signals. There were a number of shareware/hardware hacker projects a few years ago to build this stuff. My guess is that's what you are looking at, not a fully developed commerical product.

The software on the PC is used to decode the data. Contrary to what the ad says, I think this will ONLY work on pre-1996 cars, that is, ODBI. He says it will work on E46, up to 2000, I don't think so, but I could be wrong. ODBI is a 20 pin round connector, as he states. OBDII is 16 pins with a rectangular connector. He doesn't mention that at all.

So, yes it should work on your car, but I don't have any idea on what data you'll see or if it can write/reset data.

 

[Looky]

Hi,

i've bought the same kit for my E36 you've linked. It runs very well and its easy to handle. You have 4 pins( +,- and 2 data lines) to connect with your diagnosticport. You can read out all fault codes and you are able to erease it. To reset your service display is also possible. You only need a computer with 2 x RS232 port and with a speed of 9600 baud/sec.
The software is called CarSoft V.3.4 its full in english. There are better programs on market but CarSoft is the easiest one.

Cya
Looky

 

[Jon_E36]

Thanks for the replies. Well I found it while searching for something to reset the SRS light. Will it do that? Maybe I'll have to look into this a little more. Seems like it would be handy to have around.