Tips here are aimed to help buy high quality K+DCAN usb cables for bmw diagnostics or coding through INPA software
The only reason why the obdii diagnostic cables are made in China is because 90% of the materials (micro-controllers and ICs) come from there.That is, it’s mainly about cost, most people would not be ready to pay 3-4 times the price just for the device being made in Europe or the US.
(IC’s are mostly imported here, and often more expensive than outside of China, except you buy some 2nd hand stuff that got de-soldered and refurbished from old trashed equipment… But yes, all the stuff around, such as cables, connectors, casings, PCBs, labor costs are way lower than in Europe or the US, and there is a good infrastructure available here serving also small time manufacturing companies)
(IC’s are mostly imported here, and often more expensive than outside of China, except you buy some 2nd hand stuff that got de-soldered and refurbished from old trashed equipment… But yes, all the stuff around, such as cables, connectors, casings, PCBs, labor costs are way lower than in Europe or the US, and there is a good infrastructure available here serving also small time manufacturing companies)
Quality of a product depends on the Material you purchase (You can’t simply make gold out of wood), OBDexpress.co.uk provides labor such as assembling, the mechanical as well as the electronic design and of course on a good QC.
Most electronic items that are available nowadays are made in china, all the apple products, 99,9% of the laptop, notebooks and netbooks available, TV’s, DVD players. Those items are produced in high quantity and cost saving is also a big issue here, because the consumer is NOT willing to pay a high price for an item like this (take the dvd players for example.. PC motherboards, graphiccards…) Since those kind of items are produced in quantity for export and you purchase them locally – at the shop down your road.. you won’t hear many complains about them.. most of those items are just fine. For niche business such as those cables – new, small companies see the demand and simply join by doing and selling such kind of equipment and they will do it “the cheapest route” because they don’t actually know what they are selling and they actually don’t care, they just try to keep the cost at a minimum to maximize their profits…
If you take the cheapest route in China, non electronically tested PCB’s from a 2nd or 3rd grade factory, 2nd hand components (AKA refurbs), bad mechanical design and a non effective or non existent QC – and this is what many of those companies do (to save cost and maximize profits) of course the results are bad, and I am sure everyone here have seen at least one product like that, some a few more. China doesn’t have the best name in those terms, and yes a lot of things like this are happening here,but they also happen with a reason, people expect to get everything for free, and even if a product is sold at a reasonable price there is competition going on and one company will look for ways and means to offer a cheaper price to the wholesalers and consumers. (this trend that is going on like forever already is mainly caused by consumers, because they want more and more for paying less, and companies have no choice but to follow this kind of trend because otherwise they aren’t competitive)
A good friend of mine told me a long time ago, in china you can get anything – at/for any price, problem is that you will have to accept the quality. “You get what you pay for” – And this is more or less true, there will be always someone somewhere “trying to” do it for less, but there are thresholds and once you step under them, you will have to suffer from the results. There is a lot of demand for all kind of material and components in mainland china, and it really depends on in which kind of equipment they will be used, for certain things where there is a lot of competition going on you can expect the cheapest stuff, those are mainly high quantity junk products, such as ELM327 scanners, auto diagnostic tools or cables, ecu programmers so on.
Anyway, enough about the “backgrounds” and back to what we sell:
– Items at wobd2.com only use new components, but NOT second hand stuff
– All the hardware design is done by professional technicians, and they spend lots of time on hardware to achieve a mechanical stability where others only uses wires and glue.
– Technicians know how items work and can make a proper QC (there is a special canbridge built for the DCAN to check if the can part works fine, means data gets send an received over the can interfacing from and to the PC)
– Technicians work for wobd2 also do a optical inspection as well as a “power consumption” test on it to check for any irregularities.
– The K+DCAN USB cables do have tons of BMW ECU’s and access to certain cars here.
– Items at wobd2.com only use new components, but NOT second hand stuff
– All the hardware design is done by professional technicians, and they spend lots of time on hardware to achieve a mechanical stability where others only uses wires and glue.
– Technicians know how items work and can make a proper QC (there is a special canbridge built for the DCAN to check if the can part works fine, means data gets send an received over the can interfacing from and to the PC)
– Technicians work for wobd2 also do a optical inspection as well as a “power consumption” test on it to check for any irregularities.
– The K+DCAN USB cables do have tons of BMW ECU’s and access to certain cars here.
The new K+DCAN bmwis rolled out in 2016, differs from the olf k-dcan cable.
2016 NEW K+Dcan cable vs. OLD Dcan interface
Both BMW INPA K+CAN cables can:
1. Read and delete errors
2. Adaptations
3. Driver programming
4. Applu coding
…
1. Read and delete errors
2. Adaptations
3. Driver programming
4. Applu coding
…
new K+DCAN cable(US$117.99):
1- new switch
the switch on this cable to LEFT is for 7 pin, to RIGHT for 8 pin
8 pin for K-LINE communication (old DCAN cables cannot do it) for BMW from 1998 to 2008
So, it hasdual K-Line (PIN7 and 8 joined; it was fine to do that, since DCAN equipped cars did not use pin8 at all, and for many older Kline cars it was a must be to cover pin8 as well to be fully backward compatible, it turned out that BMW now “re-used” that pin8 for the latest cars that got ethernet available on the OBD2 connector, and pin8 is doing the activation for that ethernet interface.. since pin8 was covered by us with it’s original use as a 2nd Kline there will be connection problems on those new cars. But the solution is simple, all users have to do is disconnect pin8 from the interface to work on those cars. Many of the other interfaces never had this “issue” because they never covered the 2nd kline (pin8).
8 pin for K-LINE communication (old DCAN cables cannot do it) for BMW from 1998 to 2008
So, it hasdual K-Line (PIN7 and 8 joined; it was fine to do that, since DCAN equipped cars did not use pin8 at all, and for many older Kline cars it was a must be to cover pin8 as well to be fully backward compatible, it turned out that BMW now “re-used” that pin8 for the latest cars that got ethernet available on the OBD2 connector, and pin8 is doing the activation for that ethernet interface.. since pin8 was covered by us with it’s original use as a 2nd Kline there will be connection problems on those new cars. But the solution is simple, all users have to do is disconnect pin8 from the interface to work on those cars. Many of the other interfaces never had this “issue” because they never covered the 2nd kline (pin8).
2- new PCB
with FT232RQ chip
the printed circuited boardof better quality than the old one
old k+dcan cables (US$15.99):
1- No switch
2- only D-CAN for
– E60, E61 od 03/2007
– E83 od 09/2006
– E81, E87 od 03/2007
– E90, E91, E92, E93 od 03/2007
– E70 (new model X5)
– R56 (new model MINI)
– E60, E61 od 03/2007
– E83 od 09/2006
– E81, E87 od 03/2007
– E90, E91, E92, E93 od 03/2007
– E70 (new model X5)
– R56 (new model MINI)
3- Old PCB of good quality
with FT232RLchip
