What is a good scan app and OBD tool for Android

At the beginning I was using Torque Pro, because I liked the idea to record all available data with 10 Hz. (Yes, I'm kind of a nerd.) But you'll get one CSV for each trip with all recorded channels. To handle this and make diagrams and so on could be a problem without a PC and a useful software. (I'm able to use a powerful tool at work, made to handle such data very easy in testing departments in automotive industry.)
Also you have to build your own custom dashboard with live informations.

Hybrid Assistant comes with a complete dashboard and you'll get a HTML report of the recorded data, including diagrams and maps. But you cannot customize them. And I don't know how frequent the data are recorded. Because I don't use/need the huge amount of recorded data from TP any longer, I'm using HA with it's dashboard now - in combination with a cheap Android head unit (instead of the OEM stereo) und a USB-OBD dongle.

I'm not using Dr. Prius.

FP4 ?

 

It all depends what you want to be able to do. Hybrid Assistant gets you a decent amount of data from the engine ECM and the hybrid control ecu and makes a really good report. But it has no code functions.

Dr Prius gets you some data about the HV battery and can read and clear codes from the ECM and hybrid control ecu. It also has a paid (buy it once) function to guesstimate HV battery capacity.

Torque Pro can do a decent bit for codes and data for several systems but requires quite a bit of fiddling and know how to make it work.

A couple of paid apps (OBD Link and OBD Fusion) have access to more systems but are fairly slow. I frankly don't have the patience to find out what these can actually do. I just fire up Techstream instead.

Each of these apps require that you do your homework before buying the OBD2 adapter.

Nothing on android will come close to replicating the functionality of a Techstream setup.


Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Another member recently made a post using Car Scanner, and I hadn't seen people mention that app here as much, but from what I saw in that post, there are things I definitely like about it.

1. It's really useful to have an app that does not only show you trouble codes, but also shows which ECU reported each code. (That especially matters for communication codes, the ones that start with U. The code tells you which ECU something can't communicate with, but it takes two ECUs to not communicate, and the other one is the one that gave you the code).
2. It is best to have an app that just asks for all the trouble codes in the car and shows you all the responses, even if it doesn't know what they mean, even if it doesn't recognize the ECUs they come from. You can always look stuff up in the repair manual. But if the app only shows you certain codes it knows about, then you can't.

Following the link to the post above, you can see that Car Scanner reported a P0A80 code even though it doesn't know what to call the ECU it came from. (It just said ECU: 7EA, which is the ECU's raw CAN address. That's the car's power management control ECU, but the app doesn't have to know all the car's ECUs by name, as long as it just says "hey, who's got codes?" and shows you the codes.)

That's kind of a contrast with, say, Dr. Prius, which is good for giving you lots of specialized information about the Prius battery condition, but it seems to flat-out not show you any codes from the car except ones about the engine or battery.

So, to cover both of those use cases, you'd have a pretty good setup if you had both something like Car Scanner and something like Dr. Prius installed on a phone, and bought a hardware dongle they both can work with.

 

I’d recommend getting the free version of Dr Prius and look at the Dr Prius website for ODB2 dongle recommendation. They do extensive analysis of the various models on Amazon. Some are real crap. Good ones are not expensive.
Play with the free version and see if you want the paid version features or use another app.

 

Do they ship to Hawaii? Cannot go by air.

 

This is great. Thanks for mentioning this... It naturally leads to needing a list of how the ECU names show up in their app. Do you have a list we can use to figure that out?

 

I don't, other than that the app shows names for a few ECUs that are common in lots of cars, and otherwise shows the hexadecimal CAN address of any ECU it doesn't know the name for. And I don't have a list of all the CAN addresses for the Prius ECUs. But I don't think it's a difficult match-up job. There are only a couple dozen ECUs in the car, and in many cases you can guess which one is which by what codes it gives you. Or go create a known fault in something, and see which ECU you hear from.

 

I wonder if @Elektroingenieur has a sense of how to go about making a list of all the CAN addresses for the Prius ECUs?