;)
It's the lament of many would-be carport putters: today's cars are all computer chips and high tech electronics, with nary a place to jam a screwdriver and simple fix the carburetor (remember carburetors?). Worse, the traditional dashboard dummy light is now an ominous, all-encompassing engine light that only tells you to get thee to a certified mechanic and pay lots of money for their high tech diagnostic machines that are much too complicated for you and your feeble mind and your impotent screwdriver. Until now.
Davis Instruments new CarChip E/X enables commoner's access to the same techno-auto interface as those 80-buck-an-hour guys. The little unit simple snaps onto your vehicle's OBD II jack which, you may or may not have noticed, is usually mounted, naked and waiting, in or around the steering column on the driver's-side of your late model domestic or import vehicle, 1996 or newer.
Once there, CarChip automatically monitors, records, and stores up to 300 hours of trip details and measures your choice of four engine parameters like engine load, intake manifold pressure, timing advance, fuel trim, RPMs, speed and a batch of other essential info, 23 items total, at 5 - 60 second intervals.
You can unplug it at any time, after one trip or many, and then hook it up to your Windows PC and--after installing some software and a serial port adapter (included)--upload the data. You're then treated to understandable series of charts, graphs and summaries that clearly describe what your car has been doing, how it has been performing, what seems to be sliding out of whack--chronically or intermittently--and, best of all, how you have been treating the vehicle all along.
It will also reveal and explain all the innate engine diagnostic trouble codes and it will reveal the status of other engine parameters at the time(s) the code occurred.
You can also customize the CarChip by setting your own threshold of acceptability for things like speed, acceleration and braking. CarChip even acts as an "Accident Event Logger" acquiring the 20 seconds of critical data before a crash, like a personal "black box."
Obviously an informative onboard asset if you drive a lot for business--or pleasure--but CarChip is also an authoritative training aid for new drivers, or a clandestine performance monitor of family member's driving habits ("Junior, is it really 567 miles from here to the movie theatre?"), and a big-picture managerial tool for a company with a fleet of vehicles.
But at it's most basic, CarChip takes the mystery out of that mocking engine light, often enabling solutions that can, indeed, be fixed with a screwdriver if not a driver attitude adjustment. It even lets you purge the data, clear the engine light and then walk into a shop and tell Mr. 80-buck-an-hour that you're more informed than he is, and no, he can't have a look-see, just fix the exact problem and waste no time "running it through the machine." You did that already.
All told, CarChip is not for those who never knew what a carburetor was in the first place--and the software and diagnostic tools require some computer savvy, too. Nevertheless, if you've a penchant for automotive puttering, hang up the screwdriver and get a CarChip E/X.
Reviewed: Apr. 12, 2003
Type: Automotive
From: Davis Instruments
Pictures
;)
;)
;)
Data managed by EvergeekMedia.com
Powered by:
