HOWTO: Log from your ECU for less than £30

[Confused]

Knowing what is happening with your engine is critical to troubleshooting issues, ensuring healthy running, and chasing power.

Our cars have a diagnostic port, which is located under the dashboard on the driver's side, above where your left knee would be.

Whilst this port looks like a standard OBD2 (On-board Diagnostics 2) found in many other modern cars, the VR-4 was introduced before a global standard for both pin-out and communications protocol was agreed upon - so most available software and hardware which is marked 'OBD2' is not compatible with the VR-4 (namely popular mobile apps such as Torque, and the widely available bluetooth ELM327 adapters).


If you want to just read fault codes, then you can stop here - all you need is a simple piece of wire or even a paperclip - and take a look at the diagnostic codes


So - what can we do if you need more information? Well, although the protocol isn't the standardised one, it's close enough that a cheap (approximately ?10) cable designed for VAG group cars, with a minor modification, will allow communication!

What you will be looking for is a ~?10 VAG-COM KKL USB cable - they are widely available on online auction sites such as eBay, and this style is nice and cheap:

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Beware: It will need to have an FTDI chip on board, not a CHG340

Out of the box, this still won't work. We need to connect Pin 1 to ground - this just so happens to set the engine ECU into a mode where it can communicate.

There are multiple ways of doing this - I will show below my preferred method, which makes no modifications to the car, and requires no ongoing maintenance.


Firstly, open the connector up by undoing the 4 screws, and remove the cover:

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Next, remove the circuit board from the casing, and unplug:

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Now you have access to all of the pins - take a short length of wire, and solder it between pins 1 and 4. I used an uninsulated piece of wire because it's what I had to hand, but you could use insulated, as you do not want to touch any other pins:

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Once that is done, the modification is complete, and you can put it back together.


Next, you want to head on over to http://www.evoscan.com/ and purchase EvoScan software - this will set you back just $25!

The latest version (as of March 2017) is 2.9, but you will need to download version 2.7 if using this cable.

Once downloaded and installed, and your cable plugged in, run EvoScan, and from the Logging menu, select your ELM cable from the menu option, and from the 'Device cable selection' option in the top left, put a tick in the box next to Mitsubishi MUTIII.

Once you've done this, you should be able to click on 'Start Datalogger' and see some data showing in the list against the items you have checked.

The more data types you check, the fewer samples per second you'll get, so it's a balance between logging enough options and getting a good amount of data.


[I'll add some screenshots of EvoScan later!]