Cheap diagnostic tools

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have much experience with these cheap Bluetooth diagnostic tools you can buy on Amazon?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B01CP04WJW/ref=mp_s_a_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1472232823&sr=8-10&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=bmw+z4+diagnostic+tool

Just wondering if it's worthwhile having one of these in the house?

Thanks!

 

[GuidoK]

What cheap Bluetooth diagnostic tool?
I see one at £18,89 in your link?

this is what I call cheap:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ELM327-OBD2-II-Bluetooth-Auto-Car-OBD2-Diagnostic-Interface-Scanner-Tool-HA-/152184526188

And they work great with a free app like torque (android)
Reads/resets all generic engine codes, so I keep one in every car.

 

[Scooba_Steve]

You can get usb cable and inpa from bcables for about £30, not wireless and you need a laptop but I think you can do more with it.

 

[GuidoK]

you can do much more with that, but it has a steep learning curve so not suitable for everyone.
Also most distributors will use some kind of virtual machine to run the software which is a sluggish way to go about imho.
For a program like DIS you obviously have to but the other programs not always.

Obviously I use both
I always have a cheap dongle in my car, and if I need to, I get a diagnostic laptop.
But I stopped using inpa virtually completely. I now use rheingold (ista-d) most of the time. From a tablet even (windows tablet of course)
I dont think rheingold has more features for the z4 (the car is the car), but you dont have to scroll through all the seperate modules to see if there's a code or not. It can diagnose all of them in 1 screen (takes a while of course). Recognition of the modules is also pretty good (on my car it only doesnt recognize the door switches)
Looks like this:



Quite a large program though. about 10gig (and I skipped some large data files in foreign language). No problem for a laptop, but on a tablet it's quite a lot next to all the other stuff.

 

[Anonymous]

THanks for the info

I essentially want something that will give me some more information on whatever is wrong so I can diagnose an issue myself before getting it fixed (or doing it myself!)

Some places charge a fortune just to diagnose so skipping that step would be ideal.

I'm no mechanical expert at all but determined to learn as much as possible and fix as many issues as I can myself

 

[GuidoK]

Start with a cheap usb dongle and the torque app. See how that goes. In case of an engine light it'll give you the P code, from where you can start. and you can reset that code. For less than £5 its really a no brainer. It doesnt have to mean that you wont buy something more advanced (inpa/ista interface) in the future, but if you start at the bottom with that, you probably wouldnt know where to begin.

 

[ZedFourM]

For user friendliness (if not necessarily the cheapest solution), you can't go wrong with Carly.

http://www.mycarly.com/product/bmw-app/

 

[Anonymous]

For a simple solution, and iPhone support I was going to go for this one...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00WPW6BAE/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472405233&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=obd2+scanner+iphone+wifi&dpPl=1&dpID=41MJ-QsIXtL&ref=plSrch

Any thoughts?