Brand new to it all, ALDL cable spitting out garbage.

Holden/Delco Tuning. ALDL, OBD 1.5. Circa 1989 to 2004.
rawrs
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2018 5:09 pm
cars: 2004 VY II Calais

Re: Brand new to it all, ALDL cable spitting out garbage.

Post by rawrs »

Pardon the French, but fuck me running. A $5 KKL cable with a bodge wire to a resistor being sold for a 1400% markup (if my non-existent math serves?) is the best scam I have ever heard of. Why the hell am I even looking for a job? I also have doubts they are made here. Modified here, sure. But if these things cost $5 and come straight from China... Not that there's anything wrong with being made in China - there isn't - my problem lies in the fact that the listing says the cable is "Australian Made", which it very likely isn't. The thing is, with China, you get exactly what you pay for. I have some products that are pure crap, and some that are pure art. My TS-100 soldering iron (*awesome* iron) and ES120 electric screwdriver are testaments to the fact that not everything from China is crap. The iron is bulletproof, and exceeds all ratings by between 30 and 100%, and the screwdriver is pure porn, inside and out. Don't know where I'm going with this tangent, but I'll stop. Want an awesome toy for Christmas? Get yourself that screwdriver (or iron), I guess. Make yourself some ALDL cables and sell 'em for a tidy profit.

I should have damn well known. It's not like I'm brand new to electronics as a whole. I'm only new to *this* stuff. It was a moment of weakness, in desperation to fix my car, which is still having issues, but I'm going to try the braindead dumb stuff like plugs, leads, coil packs, DFI module, etc.

Should have just gotten the $7 passive cable and used my own RS-232 adapter. Which if anyone reading this thread can't afford the PCMHacking version, which seems like the ducks guts, I would probably recommend. At the very least, in doing it this way, you know what you have, and there appears to be *literally* nothing in the passive cables that can go wrong. I use this Aten UC232A cable, although it does have a major driver problem in Windows 10 at the moment. If you spam the protocol, say, by me being an idiot and accidentally pasting a huge clipboard into your terminal session, it can bluescreen your computer. This is at like 115k baud, though, but it has happened at 8192 baud. As far as I know they are aware of the issue and drivers are in active development.

But I'm definitely going to go another route this time. I hope this thread is useful to someone - don't make the same mistake I did. Absolute, bold-faced scam. Sure, you'll get the product you ask for, if you don't mind a single piece of wire and two solder blobs costing you $65.

Cheers,
Rory
Ken
Posts: 206
Joined: Tue Dec 17, 2013 1:05 am

Re: Brand new to it all, ALDL cable spitting out garbage.

Post by Ken »

rawrs wrote:Pardon the French, but fuck me running.
Sounds like that may have already happened, can you sit down yet..?
rawrs
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2018 5:09 pm
cars: 2004 VY II Calais

Re: Brand new to it all, ALDL cable spitting out garbage.

Post by rawrs »

Hah, I kinda walked into that one, didn't I? Or would that be ran into it?
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