We are glad to announce that OBD Auto Doctor supports now four new Bluetooth Low Energy OBD2 dongles. These are Carista, Vgate, LELink and Viecar.
This is especially great news for iPhone users. Because, for technical reasons, iPhones don’t support traditional Bluetooth dongles at all. Now, the latest iPhone app has support for these four new dongles. The app supported already the Kiwi 3 before. iPhone users have now five different Bluetooth dongles to pick from.
Carista, Vgate and Viecar all have a chip containing support for both traditional Bluetooth as well as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This is nice if you want to use the same dongle with your computer too. Not all computers have support for BLE but instead they have traditional Bluetooth. In this case, your computer too can communicate with the dongle. No need for hardware upgrade.
LELink is pure BLE device in similar way to Kiwi 3. It doesn’t have support for traditional Bluetooth.
Carista dongle is a reliable and safe adapter. The dongle has solid quality and small form factor.
Our iPhone app communicates with the dongle using Bluetooth Low Energy. Other OBD Auto Doctor software products use basic Bluetooth connection with it.
Vgate is a small and performing dongle. Vgate has several BLE products that we support. These include iCar Pro, iCar2 and iCar1 among others.
Remember to pick the Bluetooth Low Energy version if you need the iOS support. Other OBD Auto Doctor software uses the normal Bluetooth connection with it. Just like with Carista.
LELink is pure Bluetooth Low Energy adapter.
At the time of publishing this blog post, OBD Auto Doctor has support for it only on iOS and Android. Support on other platforms might be added later.
Viecar has similar housing as Carista but the software stack is not the same.
The adapter works with all OBD Auto Doctor mobile apps. Depending on the platform either basic Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy connection is used.
We have listed these new and some other compatible dongles in the OBD Adapters & Dongles page. There you will find links to some stores that sell these dongles.
Editor's note: This post has been updated in April 2017: Added LELink and Viecar.
Microsoft released it’s latest operating system called Windows 10 just at the end of July. We here at OBD Auto Doctor have been working hard to make sure that you can continue to diagnose your car with the new and shiny Windows 10.
Feel free to update to Windows 10 and be assured that OBD Auto Doctor continues to work as before. If you, for any reason, find anything that doesn’t work, please send us a message. We also advice you to use the latest version of our car doctor software. It’s guaranteed to be fully compatible.
We are pleased to announce that OBD Auto Doctor will be compatible with the new upcoming Kiwi 3 adapter. Kiwi 3 is the next generation of OBDII adapters and no longer requires cumbersome bluetooth pairing or wifi configurations. Simply, plug and launch the OBD Auto Doctor app.
Kiwi 3 promises to be up to 4 times faster than the nearest competitor and uses ultra low power allowing you to leave your device installed permanently in your vehicle. The adapter is compatible with all standard OBDII protocols, and it has support for firmware updates via Bluetooth. Kiwi 3 has very small form factor and employs a nearly invisible design. When inserted into your OBDII port, Kiwi 3 sits just 0.68 inches thin making it the smallest and most discrete OBDII adapter.
The latest software version for every supported platform (Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iPhone and Windows Phone) added support for 16 new OBD2 parameters. These parameters are implemented according to the latest OBD2 standard version (SAE J1979 AUG2014).
Adding these new parameters increases the value of the OBD2 software you have. All these parameters are available for our existing customers totally free. Just remember that in order for the software to be able to show the values, your car needs to support the sensors too. Typically, the newer the car the more values it supports.
With these new parameters, you will get even more out of your OBDII software. Grab the update from our website or from the appropriate mobile app store.
OBD Auto Doctor is coming for iPhone soon! We are very excited about this announcement as we are expanding our OBD2 software to even bigger audience. iPhone will be great addition to our product family that already covers Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
We have been busy and working hard the whole summer to implement the best user experience for the app. We hope you like the app or send us feedback on the areas needing improvement. The app will require iOS 7.0 or newer to function. Earlier iOS version are not supported at the moment.
The app release will be announced separately but we are targeting September for the release. The app is basically ready by now but we still want to tweak the user interface and functionality to make it even better. If you want to be part of the early adopters and help us, please join our beta testing group by sending us email to support@obdautodoctor.com.
Here are couple of screenshots of the app. We are very excited about it, how about you?
Follow us on Facebook or in Twitter to get notified about the release!
In the previous app update for Android (version 2.2) and Windows Phone (version 2.0) we added support for multiple control units. The most common and usually the only control unit is the Engine Control Module. However, newer cars are starting to have more than the ECU responding to OBD2 requests. Most cars with automatic transmission have Transmission Control Module (TCM) available for example. There can be also other controllers depending on the manufacturer and model.
Our desktop software has had the support for multiple control units for ages but with the last update we brought the support to the mobile versions too. As with all mobile version updates, this update is completely free for all of our existing customers using the app in these platforms.
In Android, the selection of control unit was added as dropdown spinner in the action bar. The screenshot illustrates a vehicle with three control units available. The selection can be made by opening the spinner by tapping the title and then selecting the appropriate control unit. The selected control unit is visible in every view where it matters and where it can be changed. After changing the control unit, the view data is refreshed from the car and information is shown for the selected controller.
Get this OBD2 application from Google Play!
In Windows Phone, the control unit selection was added to the navigation page. The controller can be changed using the list picker on top of the navigation page titled “browse”. To change the control unit, you need to come back to the browse page and do the change you wanted. The screenshot is from the same car as the Android screenshot. The car has three control units and the first one is selected. The acronym of the selected control unit is indicated on top of the view in the title.
Get this OBD2 application from Windows Phone Store!
Now it’s good time to update your app to the newest version. Remember that as with all the other features, your car needs to support multiple control units for them to show up in the app. If you have only one ECU listed, then your car has only one ECU responding to the OBD2 messages. Happy diagnosing!
We published new versions for Windows Phone and Android few days ago. These updates contained some improvements to connection establishing and some bug fixes. However, the greatest value these updates brought is the 16 new sensors that were added. All of these are totally free for all existing customers. However, remember that your car needs to support the sensors too in order for the app to be able to show the values.
In addition, the Android version is now able to read emission related permanent trouble codes (OBD Mode A). The Windows Phone app will get this feature in the next release. And the desktop version will get all the sensors and the OBD Mode A in the next release. Stay tuned!
In the last few months we have been improving the OBD Auto Doctor Android app. Now it’s time to announce the major update. We designed the user interface from scratch to reflect the requirements of a modern Android app. The user interface now follows the Android guidelines and uses modern navigation components. We achieved to flatten the navigation hierarchy and improved the functionality with new Android 4.x phones.
At the same time we are trying to address all the possible connection issues. Therefore, we are looking for eager BETA testers to try out the new app. If you want to make the app even better, join our BETA tester community. We only take limited number of testers so send us email now to support@obdautodoctor.com with the following details:
We will then invite you to participate in the testing. Let’s make OBD Auto Doctor the best Android OBDII app there is!
The final release is scheduled for later this month. We will release the app when we are satisfied with the app quality and performance.
The first version of our OBD-II app for Windows Phones was released about 11 weeks ago. We are very pleased that we chose to support Windows Phone 8 ecosystem since we’ve got over 10,000 downloads for the app this far. It’s great to see that there are so many car enthusiasts in the Windows Phone community too!
The app has got very nice welcome among the WP8 users. The feedback for the app has been positive and we highly appreciate it. Here are the top 10 reviews. Thanks for the wonderful feedback, this is what keeps us going!
We will continue to work with the app to bring you improvements and new features. You can leave your feedback or improvement ideas to the comments. We would love to hear from you!
If you still haven’t tried the app, you can get it from Windows Phone Store.
It’s my pleasure to announce that we are about to conquer yet another mobile platform with our OBD app: Windows Phone. We’ve got multiple requests to support Windows Phone ecosystem and the wishes will become reality soon. We have worked hard to come up with the best OBD software for Windows Phone devices. Due to technical limitations the older WP 7.x devices won’t be supported but all WP 8.x devices will.
We are targeting the end of August for the release. The app is quite ready with just some tuning and optimization to be done. The initial version will cover Diagnostic Trouble Codes, Readiness Monitors, Sensors and other information. More features and functionality will be added in upcoming versions.
Check out the screen shots of the coming app. What do you think of them?
By the way, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Facebook to get notified about the release!
The release date of the next version of OBD Auto Doctor for Windows and Linux is coming closer. We would like to give you a short preview of the most important feature addition made to the software: OBD data graph aka oscilloscope.
With the OBD oscilloscope, you can visualize sensor value changes easily. Graphs are great tools because they communicate information visually. Even large amount of data, or fast changing data can be interpreted much better when expressed as a graph. Graphs help you to identify sudden spikes and trends in the data.
In addition to visualizing the numeric OBD data, our software enables you to save the graphs to your computer as image files. You can share the images with your mechanics or friends, or you can post them to automotive forums when asking repair advice from fellow DIYers. The screenshots in this post are saved by OBD Auto Doctor.
Follow us on Facebook or Google Plus and get notified when the new software version with the graphs is available for download!
The Android version of our popular OBD2 software got a new version released few days ago. In this blog post I want to demonstrate one of the most important new feature of the released 1.1 version: Sensor Graph.
With the Sensor Graph you can see the OBD2 sensor values presented visually as a graph. The benefit of a graph is that it helps you to see trends in sensor value changes. It is also easier (for the co-driver) to monitor the values while driving. Moreover, the fullscreen sensor view uses black background color to save the battery life as much as possible. It’s good to use it if you wan’t to monitor some gauge for a long period of time.
The screenshots below illustrate the graphs. They demonstrate the different views in OBD Auto Doctor that let you monitor OBD2 sensor values. The screenshots are taken with the Nexus 7 tablet. The graphs really look good on large screen but they are usable smaller screens too.
If you haven’t tried the app yet, please do yourself a favor and try it now!
The red circles in the images demonstrate the places to be touched. Touching the Fuel consumption item in the list view opens up the Sensor Graph view. The Fullscreen Sensor Graph view is opened by touching anywhere in the graph within the Sensor Graph view.
OBD Auto Doctor has reached the 10,000 downloads milestone for the Android version in six weeks after launching the app on the Google Play. It’s great to see that there are some many enthusiasts that are interested in getting to know their cars better. It seems that most of our fans are early adopters since over 40% of the downloads are done with new phones and tablets running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or newer. You guys are the trendsetters of this industry!
You can expect to get several updates for the app as we are constantly working on some neat features. Currently, we are working on the Sensor Graph and you can expect to get the upgrade at the end of next week.
Thanks for everyone who has tried our app. You can leave your comments, feedback or improvement ideas to the comments or to our email. We would love to hear from you. Cheers!
If you still haven’t tried the app, you can get it from Google Play.
Today is a great day because I have the pleasure to introduce you the OBD Auto Doctor Android application. We have been very busy the last couple of months working on this OBD app for the Android platform. Now we have achieved the milestone and there is only some fine tuning to do.
I’m sure most of you are waiting for this app for Android since more than half of you voted for Android in our previous post asking which mobile operating system you preferred. I guess we picked up a good choice then.
The app is not ready for release yet but the day is coming closer and closer. We are planning to release the first version of the app to Google Play during August. The first version has already a lot of good features implemented but we will add even more of them to the app after the initial launch.
It’s real! Check out the screen shots. The one on the left is the very first Samsung Galaxy running Android 2.2 (Froyo). The shot on the right is from the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0 (ICS).
Editor's note: This post has been updated in March 2020.
I wanted to write few words about the app store (Apple App Store / Google Play) reviews. We’ve been pleased to notice that most of you have been extremely satisfied with OBD Auto Doctor mobile app. But of course there have been a few not so pleasing reviews. We hope that you realize that we have no means to contact you. We don’t get your e-mail address or other details. We’d be more than happy to try to solve any issues that you might have with the software so if you have questions or issues, please contact us using other media.
Please also take into consideration that when you read 1-star reviews from others, they might be devious rivals that want to influence the app ranking. We’ve tested the app over and over again and really believe in it. I suggest that you download the free version to your phone and make the conclusions yourself. I also recommend that you get the version first and try the connectivity with your car. If the free version works, then the paid version will also work and the other way around. We are glad to assist you on any connectivity issues.
If you, for any reason, have issues with the connection, please consider and check the following:
If you have used the software successfully with your car, please leave a positive review because others might find it useful. We are dedicated to work hard and make the OBD2 software work on every compatible car. If you encounter any issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We will read and reply to your message.
Okay folks, that’s all about the reviews, hope you enjoy the software!
Hello all DIYers,
I’m glad to announce the Scantool Garage open! Welcome to follow the development of our scan tool software, increase your knowledge in the automotive field, and begin your own passage from a journeyman to an expert.
If you are new to OBD2 diagnostics, I suggest that you start with the tour page and try out the neat features yourself.
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April 22, 2021
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