"Commercial" VagCom- more stuff it can diagnose?
 

Afternoon all,

Decided to buy myself one of the cheapy eBay cables. Ordered yesterday, arrived today +++ £17 including software and postage.

I've been having a play on the car and it seems to be pretty good, cleared some faults on the central locking, also a fault I knew about on the satnav, but nothing coming up for engine/gearbox.

I have a slight problem ATM whereby the car feels like it is misfiring almost at 30ish MPH. I did think it was the gearbox, so took it to the local specialist who road-tested it and doesn't reckon it is. They indicated that, even though there are no faults on my Vagcom showing, an Audi dealership would have a better interface-

Is there any point shelling out a fortune to plug into Audi's system- I mean, is it going to be able to detect any different faults?

Ta!

And also, has anyone tried putting the "Sport" code into the gearbox? Quite tempted.

I didn't feel much difference coding 'sport' mode into the gearbox to be honest.

The ebay lead should work for you to set everything. You'll need to keep an eye on the values as you get to 30mph (VAG-Scope I think it's called) to see what the car may be throwing up as it might not be bad enough to trigger the CEL, but enough to make you think it's not right.

Ah I see. So vagscope can be used on the move? Interesting. Would this pick up on-the-go faults that wouldn't be stored then? And how does one use it in practice to keep an eye on engine or gearbox?

I think there's a manual on the ross-tech site for it.

It can log to an CSV file if I remember rightly, so you can look at the figures and see if anything looks out of place.

Using a dumb terminal and the shareware version of VagCom will not allow all the capabilities of VagCom. You need to use a registered copy and the pucka lead to release its full potential.

Vag Scop is a piece of software that allows you to chart the outputs from most of the pick-ups on the car and record them in a CSV file for later analysis. Again a registered copy of VagCom will do more.
You will need to monitor channels 1, 19 and 20 to see misfires as they happen and where in the revange it happens.

I have a dumb terminal and a registered copy and it will do nearly all monitoring and coding but not all and certainly not as easily and as fast as the real lead.

Probably a stupid question but what is a dumb terminal?

A dumb terminal is what you buy of fleabay for 15 squid. It adds nothing to VagCom just acts as a connector for the software to the car.

The proper terminal are a bit smarter and a lot dearer and allow you to do quite a bit more. My dumb lead won't let me clear all faults at once only one section at a time.

Some of the dumb leads from Fleabay aren't 'dumb' but pirate copies of the Ross-Tech leads and usually suggest that you only use a specific version (shipped with them).

I've had 2 dumb leads (one proper dumb and one 'fake') and they both died pretty quickly, so I bought a proper one second hand and haven't looked back.