New tool: CAN USB Cable

Some time before last Christmas, we noticed we were wasting too much time in determining the right way to connect to the car CANBUS and thus decided to buy a CAN connector. Looking for it on ebay we came across some affordable USB to can cables and we placed an order on both the items.

Now, after a month and a half, they finally arrived. This is the content of the USB cable package:

The cable seems pretty well made. We'll see how it behaves when we'll start using it.

The software that came in the cd is only for Microsoft Windows, as expected. It contains only a folder, no setup tools, with a poorly made program, very old Visual Basic style. This is what the main screen looks like:

This is the Opel car models list "supported" by the software:

Choosing Vectra-C from 2002 unfortunately reveals that support for that model is under development.

And this is the settings page. Our hope to have a tool that could tell us the bus speed and the other connection parameters vanished after seeing this screen:

First impression is that this is a poorly useful tool. We hoped to get some data on the correspondence between CAN packet identifiers and actual devices in the car, but it seems we are out of luck.

We hope to have some time soon to plug it to the car and see what this software can tell.