Thread: Bonafide, guaranteed to work without fail, all day everyday ELM327 type device.

Alright guys, I'm looking for a device that is like the elm327 I bought off of EBay that is actually going to work. I really like the Torque App and how it works and all the myriad of data that can be seen, but I'm fed up of this finicky device. I bought the cheap one and it works on my wife's car but is useless as tits on a boar hog for any of my other cars. I want one that is setup like the one I bought but maybe not a knockoff. I have seen the little gauge deal and the other scanner, but they look like something that is permanently mounted. I like the portability of the dongle and phone. Is there a elm327 that isn't a cheap imitation? I don't mind spending more if it works. I'm about at my wits end as to why this car will not go into boost and have tried everything even attaching a micro switch to the bypass to tell when it's open and it seems that the computer is doing it. When I bypass the computers ability to control it, it seems it limits throttle opening, there is no other way to explain it. So what is out there? I saw a Bosch one at Hi-Lo that says it wi work with IPhone and Android and it is about $100 but if there is something better or at least the same class and it works I'm all for it. I don't mind spending $100-150 for one that I know will work with my 05'.

Jeff

The link you posted is a bunch of random scanners. The BAFX one I have read about but I see that some are counterfeit as well, who sells a legit one? I'm willing to go to the $200 price range, but it has to work with all American made cars and imports as well. I work on a lot of different cars, so I don't want something that is picky about brand.

Jeff

Just learned that BAFX is in Milwaukee, I'm going to try to pick one up since I'm here anyway.

That's a very generous offer, I might take you up on. if everything falls through. I'm only about 20 minutes away from BAFX, got their address and phone number. I'll call them in the morning. I am going to meet with my customer at 6:30 but I'm expecting a package UPS red so it won't even be in until 10:30 so I will be dead in the water until then. It's a warranty call so I'll just let him know I will be back later and take an early lunch. Maybe while I'm there I can hook it up to the Chevy Cruze and make sure it works. I have the app installed on my work phone so it should either work or not. If not I'm sure one of them has it on their phone and could show me. We will see in the mean time I am going to check out the other one you listed.

thanks,

Jeff

You are talking about the one you have right?

Ok, cool. I'm going to call BAFX here in a few when they open

I have to agree, ScanTool customer service is good. I had a problem importing some PID's, so I put a post on their Facebook page and got back to me in a couple of hours.

Thanks for the info guys, I will go with scan tool if the BAFX one doesn't work out, I had been going back and forth with Kevin and Brad about getting one and it should be home before me. Unfortunately they won't let you just pick one up, but they did send it expedited shipping for free. They say they stand behind it fully and it's guaranteed to work with ALL models, so we will see when I get home, if not I'll return it personally. Unfortunately I will be leaving for Dayton Ohio on the 27th so I will only have this weekend to mess with it. My wife and kids are going to be pissed, think I will cut out all service calls for a month or send someone else this is getting ridiculous.

Jeff

I have the original generic one with black plastic and blue and orange decal. Knock on wood, but it's worked on everything I've tried it on and works with Torque and Scangauge

Yes I've heard that before, in fact I purchased one from the advice of someone on this board. Needless to say it was a POS. The only thing the Chinese are good at is copying things and even then they do a piss poor job. You have to be pretty much up their asses to make sure they are making your items correctly or they screw it up. Their engineering is the worst, and even when they manage to copy something correctly they screw it up by trying to make changes and cutting corners. I was leary about getting one but since it was recommended I thought it would work.

Jeff

Dude it's no big deal, I don't blame you at all. You gave me your recommendation based on your luck with them. I blame the Chinese, they are a bunch of cheap no good underhanded crooks. We used to have a power supply that was from a company out of Florida that had them made in Taiwan, well the raw electrolyte was actually made in China and they lacked the ability or the care to make sure that the PH level was correct and since they couldn't. We ended up having a failure rate of 98% within 6 months and 99.6% within 1 year. Our warranty is 18 months so we ate a lot of it. We did a lot of warranty replacements and repairs from the early 2ks to about 2005-6 somewhere around there. We ended up specifying a Japanese manufactured Cap and all the problems went away. Now our MTBF is like 5 years. So if you have a DVD player, LCD TV, computer monitors ,computer power supplys or really anything that uses a switching power supply you can bet dollars to doughnuts that it just has a few failed caps. I've actually made pretty good money repairing TV's, monitors, computers and all sorts of things just because of bad caps. I used to go into pawn shops just to look for "broken" flat screen TV's to fix and resell.

And that's just one problem I have with them. (Not as a people, per se but the just a lot of what they do as a country)

Jeff

I have been buying and failing with those blue obd2 dongles since December finally I got one that works.

A buddy of mine is an IT guy and we fixed 20 lcd monitors he had laying around that didn't work. Then we sold them cost me about $8 in capacitors and we made $600.

My neighbor, a good friend of mine is the IT manager for a large construction company and he brings their bad monitors home and we charge $75 to repair them under my old DBA (expired) for Car Audio Concepts and we've fixed about 25 of them and it's always a 1600 micro farad 16 Volt cap that has failed (usually in other devices too). We wait till he has 3-4 and then we do an assembly line while he's taking themm apart I desolder the caps and install new ones then we put them back together and split the money. I actually built my AR-15 with some of that money. It usually takes us about an hour total to do 4, he is a hero to his boss. Lol.

Also repaired many of the little APC UPS's and a couple of the larger server UPS's. My degree is actually in electronic engineering (Associates) so that helps.

Jeff

I just got home and it arrived! Even better than that it works!!!!

had a new fault tonight when testing O2 bank 1 low. It also showed a psi of 14.65 so I'm wondering about that. I'll bring up my original thread.

.Jeff