INPA ISTA and the cable required

P

PDJ

Senior member
 Worsley Manchester
So I am interested in the INPA and or ISTA and obviously a cable to connect to my E85 Z4MR 2006

Mainly for diagnostics and some coding is the main use in that order.

Having spent almost all of the morning looking at different web sites and you tube there is loads of info but 40% of it on forums descends into a discussion on the merits of cheap versus expensive cables but this is not helping much so if the seasoned users of the above software could be so kind as to guide me to the best place to get the software and cable that would be great.

Paul.
 
If you are going to code with NCS Expert (which is included with the bundle from BCables), you will need to separately download NCS Dummy (free from the web) in order to safely do the job. I don't know why they didn't include that.
 
I have also been looking in to this, mainly to be able to read fault codes.
I started with where to download INPA (and the rest of the coding tools) and ISTA. Since the E85/E86 are old cars, I don't need the latest version of ISTA.
I found BimmerGeeks.net have a reputation of easy to install and working SW. I downloaded and successfully installed Standard Tools (INPA, NCS Dummy, etc.) and ISTA-D (4.01) from them on an old laptop with an up-to-date Windows 10 64-bit OS. Installation guides are included in the downloads.

I bought a cheapish (china)cable from a local website here in Sweden. It's a K+DCAN in clear plastic with switch for pin 7 & 8 (pin 7 & 8 should be connected for E85/E86). Most china-based cables use FTDI-chip. So I downloaded their drivers. Everything have installed fine, but I have yet to actually test it with the car.
 
Paul I’ve been using laptop and cable loaned to me by Mark Plant from on here- very good

May be good to drop him a line?

Stuart
 
I have now connected everything to the car. Both INPA and ISTA worked fine.
I started with INPA and used functional jobs to read all the modules and fault codes on my E86. However, not all modules showed up when reading fault codes. Not sure why, since I could connect to them separately just fine. Maybe the script used for functional jobs are not working fully for facelift cars? Also the fault code list were mostly in German.

I found ISTA much easier to use for reading and clearing fault codes. Everything is in English and often with a description of what the fault means. It connected fine to all the modules on my car.
 
bigwinn said:
Paul I’ve been using laptop and cable loaned to me by Mark Plant from on here- very good

May be good to drop him a line?

Stuart
Click to expand...

The stuff that Stuart has I got from bc cables, although I think the software you get now is newer, but could be wrong
 
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