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I found this on the net, there seems to be a fair few with issues connecting their elm device in car although working on bench. The below instructions worked for a fair few people, apparently the drivers that come with the elm devices are very outdated (version 1.003 or somewhere there abouts) and reinstalling the new drivers fixed them. Another problem is if the cars pin 16 isnt outputting 12v then the elm may have enough power the light up the leds but not enough to successfulyl initialise communication between elm and computer.
ALso to check that its not actually my software being a pain, use a free OBD2 softare such as OBDwiz to or easyobd11 to check if your elm devices actually connect. If they dont, then its an issue with the elm, if they do, then we will need to log what the software is doing and compare to mine although I suspect that it may be a driver issue?hi, i had the same issue as you guys, i installed the driver that came with the elm 327 from ebay and it didnt work so i googled it and found this site. i went to http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm
and installed the 2.04.06 drivers and it seems to be working fine now.
this is what i did:
1. uninstall the drivers that came on the cd with the "ebay elm327"
- the instructions on how to do this should be on the cd (mine were"
2. download the drivers from the link provided and unzip them in a folder that you can remember.
3. connect the elm to the usb port, it should say something like new device detected and the driver installation should pop up, instead of trying to load drivers from the "elm cd" select install from a specified location and select the folder with the newly downloaded drivers.
i then unplugged the elm and restarted the computer , then i connected it to the computer and launched the free scantool software, and it worked !!! you might not be as lucky but so far so good for me, i've used it on two cars today and it seems to be communicationg just fine. good luck