Today we got a call from someone who had bought a copy of Mercedes DAS from a distributor in Canada, and needed help because his installation had timed out on him !
Not a problem ! Took us about an hour and finally found the problem. Be careful who your buying from, make sure they have good tech support ! We tech support anybodies system!
We just completed a full install on the Dell E6420 and have been testing it’s functionality through the iScan II WT ! We were hung up briefly on the PIWIS stuff, had to tinker around in the network settings to get us into the tester. Everything else is looking pretty good !
We got a call from our buddy Mike in Oregon having issues after he swapped a HDD we sent him ! His Mercedes DAS was now failing to connect through the COM port (serial port) !! We are not quite sure why this happened because it was working in our shop on an identical laptop !
We got on Teamviewer and took control of his laptop. We went under Device Manager and removed the COM2 port, restarted and it re-installed the drivers and voila ! Not really sure why the COM port stopped working properly, this isn’t the first time we have fixed a customers problem with re-installing something that’s for sure.
This was sent to us in an email today.
We were featured in a magazine that distributes throughout the frontrange, Partsandpeople!
You can view the entire online magazine here : http://partsandpeople.com/node/3433
Or just look for our ad on Page 6 !
We are also mentioned by a number of other shops in the area for our experience with diagnostics in the area. Bill from Auto Mobile Tech mentions us ! Bill is one of the most capable outfits in the Denver area for automotive diagnostics !
Got a call from a customer of ours in Utah.
Damian had a 2005 Smart car, “Smart for 2” model, .76 Turbo, Gas.
He was trying to do an adaptation to relearn the shifting patterns in the transmission. He first thought to whip out the Autologic and try to do it but after a few attempts he could not get it to work. So he then brought out the 04/09 DAS, STILL wouldn’t start the procedure. This is when he gave us a call, and like an earlier post I made, this is another situation where we advised him to use an older version of DAS, and viola !
Volvo S40 we used for Diagnostics
Whew, lets see, last post was on the first, so last Wednesday. Well, the whole house has some flu like bug, I watched it jump from each individual person then finally landed on me for Thursday. Woke up aching with pretty heavy head cold symptoms, lasted until about Saturday. Also it snowed here in Boulder about 12 inches on Friday, so we’ve been pretty snowed in.
Volvo + A lot of snow
We are helping a customer with a Volvo VIDA 2010D installation and realized that 2010D drops the VCT2000 unit and currently 2010A is the most recent software that can be used through the iScan II. Would be nice to have these kinds of specifications for people to see up somewhere for iScan. So I started an install on VM because of Ford and Land Rover IDS systems interfering with other softwares.
Started working on gathering screen shots for product comparison. Of course I wanted to start with the Autologic vs OE software’s. With the assistance of my little brother we sat out front of the house in a Volvo , taking screenshots of Autologics and Volvo ViDa 2010D software. Its amazing how much information the Volvo ViDa software contains. They almost make it so easy that you don’t need to be a trained mechanic. Whereas the Autologic really doesn’t have any kind of guided fault finding, or at least very limited. I haven’t personally played with Volvo ViDa very much at all, took me a few minutes to get orientated with the layout, and after a little while it’s not quite so difficult. The guided fault finding goes into depth with pictures and diagrams.
I was reading a procedure to check the blower motor in the middle console, that had diagrams of the 3 fan control knobs, and told you the steps to read out the correct voltages at different fan speeds etc. Extremely useful stuff. As powerful as Autologic is in the European car market, the OE software’s give owners a large advantage.
-Worked on cleaning up the Compact 3 update for a customer in Charlotte, NC.
Whew, this touchscreen was a headache but we finally got through it. Once we got DAS/WIS/Xentry installed the CEASAR test failed and we nearly quit ! We got the customer to send us his Compact 3 cable which is different from the C3 Star cables we were testing with. We later figured out that there is a configuration file where you can change a value for the different types of hardware ! Good to know, and glad we got the Compact 3 working. Was cool to work with the Mercedes factory system !
-Worked on finishing up a 05/07 DAS/WIS/Xentry install for a T30 for a customer who already has a more recent version of DAS. We have been doing this more and more after realizing there are some functions that work on versions of DAS that are closer to the year model of the car your trying to diagnose. A customer of ours, who is a smart car independent shop, had a dealership contact him because they could not code a key on a 2008. Our customer was using 05/07 at his shop and had it done in 15 minutes ! This has sparked our interest, and we were thinking of doing a DAS “ALL” package that includes close to 8 different versions of DAS, all on one computer using virtual machine.
Off topic
-Started experimenting with cloning hard drives up to our FTP server for better management. That way we don’t have to have the backup hard drives for our customers physically ! Saves us room, and now we can get rid of some of these hard drives that have been sitting around for ever just taking up space !
-This is my first post, and coming from using Dreamweaver for the default website (http://www.autodiagcart.com), WordPress seems complicated ! The “Famous 5 minute install” took me about an hour through support with my host (ended up being an error on their end, so it wasn’t me being the noob!). Other then that, looks like playing with it will be quite productive.
Thats it for yesterday !