Cars have come a long way in terms of providing information to the operator, but I still have an older car, and this diagnostic feedback is generally limited to: “Something’s wrong with your oil pressure” and “Something’s generally wrong”. And aside from inciting panic, this information has done little to help, other than causing me to schedule a future appointment with a mechanic which, in one notable case, was way too late (I had no oil in my car for some reason, the oil light didn’t come on–just the engine light, and I drove the car for a week this way–resulting in fused cylinders).
So it’s no surprise that I’ve long had my eye out for an OBDII reader. Eventually I began to look in earnest, and decided upon this cute little tool:
I chose this model for a couple reasons: mostly because it was the only model that supported Bluetooth for iOS (I didn’t want to mess around with switching between WiFi), and its software was being actively maintained. Specifically, one can run the diagnostic on any outstanding error codes, see an explanation, and receive a list of historically-successful repairs for the given code–not a bad deal for $99 (no subscription required).
Of minor concern is that the device apparently lacked any form of signal authentication. But upon further research, I found that it got around this by restricting sync time to one minute after car start, and thereafter limited connections to one device. Given the range of Bluetooth, I found this to be reasonable.
And after doing some playing around, I found a live data dashboard. This customizable screen outputs selected data to my phone’s screen in real-time, which is more cool than anything, since I doubt it will actively help me discover a problem when it happens. Still, cool.
Nerdy tech aside, I’m hoping that this time, when something goes wrong, I’ll at least be able to determine the immediate severity and avoid having to replace another engine.
And did I mention it was cool?
–Simon