Vehicle Safety on your Summer break

Summer is just around the corner, so it’s time to start thinking about taking a break. If you are planning on driving somewhere this summer season, we have the perfect product for you to ensure vehicle safety so your holiday can get started without a hitch. We are bringing you the K2L901 OBD USB KKL Diagnostic: a simple device that you can plug into your vehicle to run a diagnostics test and make sure that everything is in working order.

We published a do-it-yourself vehicle diagnosis system in Elektor Electronics back in October and November 2002. Since then, the interface has been standardised in the EU under the name EOBD, and is mandatory on all newly-registered cars, both petrol and diesel.At the same time, the number of different protocols used for transferring data has risen from three to five, with the CAN bus protocol becoming more and more successful.

In last month’s article we took a look at the background and specification of the OBD-2 diagnostic connector fitted to new cars. Now, as promised we present an interface adapter that allows your car to confess its innermost secrets to your computer.We can thank an EU directive dating from 1998 for the introduction and standardisation of the OBD-2 vehicle diagnostic connector. The connector is standard on all spark-ignition engined vehicles from 2000 and should be fitted to diesel engined variants by 2003. The communication protocols used can come in three different varieties. In Europe the most common protocol is the ISO standard. All of these protocols rely on serial data transfer but the signal levels and message format are not compatible with the serial communications port of a Personal Computer.