Diagnostic Computers, Actia Lexias, Peugeot Planets and others

Hi all,

Has anyone else noticed the plethora of Actia Lexia diagnostic machines (and others) on ebay over the last couple of months? I've ben watching this for a while and only the odd garage closing sale produced a working machine. Recently they are selling brand new pukka Lexia machines (with or without laptops) together with all the nice toys along with it. This includes the usb interface harware, the whole diagnostic troubleshooting software and all the wiring diagrams which are interactive with the measured faults.

Whilst the prices for these are still out of my league (£1000 - £1200) the trend is definitely downwards. It seems to me that someone somewhere has decided to change from low sales quantity/ high margin philosophy to a "stack-'em-high an' sell-'em-cheap" philosophy. If it continues like it is then I'm hoping the price will come down to an even more realistic level as the market saturates.

Has anyone else noticed this and have any inside knowledge to explain it? My view above is purely a guess. Another driver may be that the interfaces may have been being made in China and some little Chinesse guy is now making a fast buck by flogging them on the side or even legitimately under some patent expiration rule or such.

However, if I'm right, then we need some kind of coordinated effort, at least on club-xm, to not bid up the selling price of these by bidding against each other. There appears to be no end of supply so eventually we'll all get one.

Apart from diagnosing my own faults at a time when it suits me, the bigger attraction for me is to eventually develop a comms link to make all information obtainable from the diagnostic socket available on the dot matrix display on the dash. I'm absolutely convinced it is very simple to achieve. I know for example that the 54 character display can be made to display any message you like. The stumbling block until now has been that Citroen wouldn't release the comms protocol publicly so comms with the ecu's wasn't possible unless you bought a very expensive computer. The advent of these cheap(er) diagnostic computers may just change all that.


And by chance someone has beaten me to it (albeit for an OBDII car). Wouldn't this be great if we could do this with the display on the XM?
http://www.vanaaken.com/europe/index.asp?pagename=scangauge

cheers

noz

This post has been edited by noz on December 07, 2007 11:45 pm

Hi Noz,

It looks as if George might have solved the problem of which pin does what.

Derek

But isn't that an S1 car in George's photo, or is it a car with an S1 dash and S2 electronics?

Also, I'll really start to feel left out on my no-LCD-display S1 Presteige :-( Were they the only models without the display?

No there are loads of S2 cars without any display Dr Tim. (Lh side of course )

Quote by Dr Tim " But isn't that an S1 car in George's photo, or is it a car with an S1 dash and S2 electronics?".

You're right of course - I hadn't spotted that. (Hangs head in shame).

Derek

This post has been edited by DerekW on December 08, 2007 12:05 am

I am presuming demaq that this is a joke about the reliability odf the S2 displays, though the smiley in brackets is ambiguous! Or do the SX models not have the display or something?

A colleague at work has one of those little scan gauges. He used to have it connected up all the time to his 107. Natty little thing it was too. He's since bought a Megane Coupe Cab so I don't know if he now needs it.

Steve.

Yes spot on DrTim. There are many dodgy S2 displays.

Hi Noz and all

the perspective is very interesting. I'd pay £100 to have real-time info like voltage, temps, pressures, on my matrix. I regret sooo much the XM doesn't have a voltmeter -like many old Italian cars had-. It'd have saved me a great hassle a couple of times. I'm always thinking of installing one but then 1/they're not cheap, and also 2/don't want to add a foreign-looking element on the dash -I love my S1 dash!-.

Will be watching the area with great interest -unfortunately I cannot contribute anything in the domain!-

cheers
George

Hi All, I used to be on this forum ages ago but have only just had my interest re-kindled. I presume that NOZ is my old buddy Norrie, 2 X 2.5td in Scotland... surely there can't be another one.
Interesting that you should mention the plethora od Lexia 3 units as I have doing alot of research in this area - 2 parallel lines of research
1. Available diag tool that will talk to our 30 pin connector / protocol
2. Diy solution. It all started when I was on the market for a non-XM OBD11 solution and a friend of mine bought one from ebay USA.
I could not believe the features and price.
There were 2 types one that did OBD2 with a beautiful dot matric graphic display and one that did ODB2 and CAN with the same display. the first was about £29 and the 2nd was £45.


Then I decided to trace the manufacturer of the unit to find out what their selling price was and traced them to China - they are the biggest company in China involved in diag tool development.


In fact this company was commissioned by Actia (the diag system developer for Peugeot Planet, Elit, Lexia diag 2000 etc.
) to do the dirty work of building the stuff.
This chinese company has built many manufacturers systems and now offers very low cost OBD2 DIY systems but is also now selling the manufacturer types direct.
The Lexia 3 system is simply an external box that goes to PC with USB and a cable to go the ECU. I spoke with their sales team who are asking $1800 dollars retail and substantially less for trade. I think the trade price is about $1000 for a box of the Lexias. I tried to negotiate them down to $300 and they did listen but refused to go that low.
http://www.uiftech.com/productInfo.jsp?pro...D=125&intPage=1
this unit may also do the job.
http://www.uiftech.com/productInfo.jsp?pro...ID=68&intPage=1
and the great OBD2 and CAN unit
http://www.uiftech.com/productInfo.jsp?pro...ID=17&intPage=1

So i went back to the drawing board to look at a DIY solution. Ist, there was a posting on the XM-list in the files section from a Swedish / German ? guy about the Citroen codes and methods of diagnosing codes. He said that the 30pin MK2 connector supports both the early ISO / OBD access method K-Line/L-Line but also flash codes like a MK1. If this is true It does give a huge boost to at least diagnosing MK2 errors.
Has anyone tried this???
I have also continued with a PC/software method to access the ECU. I think that this is viable and am on the cusp of achieving this with my laptop, the problem is knowing what the memory locations are for real-time readings etc as connecting to the ecu and getting back codes is one thing but knowing their meaning is another. Also knowing what memory location to request for real-time values is unclear.
IF that can be resolved, then the comms can be placed into a microprocessor (achieving NOZ's objective)
I currently have a friends Alfa Romeo that uses the same access method as the MK2 XM and am using that for development. The difference is that the returned error codes and memory locations for real-time values will be different but at least I have got the Fiat document to explain their method and once working with the Alfa it will be a case of modifying the codes in the software for the XM but at least the comms would have been proven.

long post, but a lot to say!
Mo