View Single Post
  #171  
Old 08-21-2007, 06:20 AM
Nomake Wan's Avatar
Nomake Wan Nomake Wan is offline
Retired
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Orange, CA
Posts: 1,031
Send a message via AIM to Nomake Wan Send a message via MSN to Nomake Wan Send a message via Yahoo to Nomake Wan Send a message via Skype™ to Nomake Wan
So I'm watching this series about a guy asking about problems on a message board and I say to myself, why not this stuff yourself, silly?

Here's the "weird cable" that the guy plugged in. This confirms that the device used was a "Select Monitor II," PN22771AA030.



And here's the one that plugged into it. I told you it looked like a parallel port!!



Sadly I'm getting these from the dealer equivalent of Subaruparts.com, so they aren't exactly forthcoming with the technical details. I was lucky they had photos, let alone a color one. I have exhausted my Google skills without luck for finding any tech specs of the SSMII. All I can offer are these pictures, for now...

EDIT: Thinking alone garners many things. Like this.

So I'm looking at the picture of the "weird cable" that I'd never seen before, and going, "I think I've seen that before." It's the OBDII connector from the VWRX site. So then I remember that the site says that the OBDI and OBDII connectors have the same properties, just different pin locations. Makes sense that all they need is a simple cable to change forms. And then it further hits me. The cable is parallel. Vikash used parallel. And using parallel, Vikash didn't need a converter box at all... he just wired a parallel cable straight up to the Metra adapter and went from there. Is Parallel TTL? Or...something? Never mind, just d that and sure enough parallel is TTL. That answers that.

So considering the Hex Comm software is incredibly basic and the ECU accepts our commands, it's unlikely that it's the software at fault for the ECU errors. And since the SSMII works fine, then it's unlikely it's the ECU causing the ECU errors (as weird as that sounds). Which leaves only the converter box. Something is wrong with the converter box.

Phil, do you have a parallel port on that laptop you're testing with? Any chance you could mock up a really temporary test parallel cable?

Last edited by Nomake Wan; 08-21-2007 at 06:50 AM.
Reply With Quote