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Yousuf Khan
Sorry about the crosspost, but I own a Pontiac and a Subaru, and this
topic is relevant to both anyways.
So I recently got myself an OBD-II car code scanner cable for my laptop,
and during research I found out that all cars after 2008 will have to be
CANbus compliant. They made a big deal out of specifying what cars prior
to 2008 are already CANbus-capable. I didn't want to have an obsolete
tool for any future cars I might buy, so I looked up what the
differences were between CANbus and OBD-II. After reading up various
websites about CANbus, such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canbus
So I found out that CAN stands for Controller Area Network, and that it
seems to be a networking specification for car components, similar to
the network specification that connects your PC to the LAN. It doesn't
seem to be specifically about diagnosis of faults in your car, just
general internal communications between components. So I'm thinking do I
really care if my fuel injectors communicate with my power window motors?
Basically, all I wanted to know was how does it affect me? Do I need a
new cable to connect to the car, or do I keep using the existing OBD-II
cable? My feeling is that nothing has changed, and that they just added
a few more codes to the standard OBD-II codes (the P0xxx codes) and the
proprietary manufacturer codes (the P1xxx codes). I think all they did
was add some additional diagnostics codes to check whether network
connections are working between the components on a CANbus, but the
format remains the same. The additional codes are the Uxxxx codes, as
listed in this link:
http://www.aa1car.com/trouble-codes/can_codes.htm
I think this might be what the case is, just some additional codes. But
the method of connection is exactly the same as before, and that we're
not really going to be plugging our scan tools directly into the CANbus.
Yousuf Khan
topic is relevant to both anyways.
So I recently got myself an OBD-II car code scanner cable for my laptop,
and during research I found out that all cars after 2008 will have to be
CANbus compliant. They made a big deal out of specifying what cars prior
to 2008 are already CANbus-capable. I didn't want to have an obsolete
tool for any future cars I might buy, so I looked up what the
differences were between CANbus and OBD-II. After reading up various
websites about CANbus, such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canbus
So I found out that CAN stands for Controller Area Network, and that it
seems to be a networking specification for car components, similar to
the network specification that connects your PC to the LAN. It doesn't
seem to be specifically about diagnosis of faults in your car, just
general internal communications between components. So I'm thinking do I
really care if my fuel injectors communicate with my power window motors?
Basically, all I wanted to know was how does it affect me? Do I need a
new cable to connect to the car, or do I keep using the existing OBD-II
cable? My feeling is that nothing has changed, and that they just added
a few more codes to the standard OBD-II codes (the P0xxx codes) and the
proprietary manufacturer codes (the P1xxx codes). I think all they did
was add some additional diagnostics codes to check whether network
connections are working between the components on a CANbus, but the
format remains the same. The additional codes are the Uxxxx codes, as
listed in this link:
http://www.aa1car.com/trouble-codes/can_codes.htm
I think this might be what the case is, just some additional codes. But
the method of connection is exactly the same as before, and that we're
not really going to be plugging our scan tools directly into the CANbus.
Yousuf Khan