Introduction
Vehicles are being manufactured with an ever increasing amount of internal electronics. A car bought today may have dozens of computer chips and an internal electronic communication network. This new world was born from the marriage of the micro chip and automotive industries. The top chip makers developed special microprocessors & memories that are now used extensively by the car manufacturers. As time goes on the amount of electronics and complexity will increase further.

A growing problem faces the car manufactures, the professional car repair stations and even the D.I.Y. enthusiast. How can this ever increasing amount of electronics be maintained, monitored. supported and repaired? In the early days car manufacturers produced equipment and tools to test and support the new automotive electronics. Later a number of other companies produced testers for use at automotive repair stations. This equipment was expensive, sometimes unreliable, limited in the tasks covered and typically would not work with many types of car. Thus the repair person faced the purchase of an array of expensive tools, testers and vehicle Test Equipment. None of which achieved the desired results.

Plant Link S.L. itself was founded by the merging of the chip and automotive worlds & has engineers from both industries. Though originally from the chip business, we have worked for many years inside the automotive industry. We produce electronic test equipment, much of it being PC based. Our testers are used by some of the major automotive companies in their factories. They are employed to carry out full functional and other tests during the original manufacture of the electronic modules, prior to their assembly into vehicles. This background places Plant Link S.L. in the perfect situation to be able to design the ideal vehicle analyser.

We used our experience to develop a range of low cost adapters that could bring the power of the ordinary PC into the automotive world. The Plant Link S.L. adapters enable communication between a vehicle and any laptop or PC. The adapter and included software is all that you need to run a full set of diagnostics on your car. In fact it will give you a test capability equal to or better than the larger equipment currently used by professional car repair organisations. How can the Plant Link S.L. adapters work better than equipment that costs 10x as much? The answer is simple, the adapter and software enable the PC to do all the work.

Most vehicles, from 1996 onwards have OBDII (On Board Diagnostics) and a suitable connector in the car to provide access. Simply plug one end of the Plant Link S.L. adapter into the car connector and the other into your PC (Serial Port or USB Port). Below is a rough guide to vehicle manufacturers and protocols used by them. As most manufacturers were inconsistent in the past and are now moving to CAN, it is advisable to check with the vehicle documentation or supplier to determine the protocol used.