Cheap Thing in "Works Well" Shokka

U380. Surprisingly functional.

When I first bought my car (Quentin Wilson's "bargain of the year" - an R170 Mercedes SLK) it had a couple of very minor issues. Those being that it was full of water and  the expensive looking "Check Engine" light kept coming on. Diagnosis needed something slightly more sophisticated than what I have in my toolbox (bent screwdivers and dirt) so I took a punt and bought one of these U380 OBD scanners from a popular auction site for just over £20. This is the newer model that can read a CAN bus, my decade old car has no such thing and instead uses one of the older "ISO" protocols - the scanner is backwards compatible. In theory I could have bought the older, non-CAN model U280 scanner but it wasn't significantly cheaper.

So for the price of 10 seconds of a white suited Mercedes mechanic's time I was able to read and reset the fault code. That was some time ago and it's never come back so we will call it fixed.

It won't pick up all the codes the car can generate - for example if I want to read the roof control computer I'll need to re-wire the scanner "a bit". Kind of hoping I won't have to though.