NefMoto

So, a year or two ago, I was out on the road 100 miles from home tuning a car and attempted to program my HexCan VCDS cable with MPROG to work with Galletto. I bricked the cable, and KTM733 on this site was nice enough to send me a read of his Hex Can USB cable so I could reprogram mine. That DID work to get it going again. Somehow I lost my cable like a moron, and for like 6 months I have been borrowing my buddies VCDS cable, unfortunately it wouldn't do CAN.

He took it back a month ago, and I've been SOL. Then I remembered I have a cloned Vag K Can Commander immobilizer tool, and wondered if I could successfully upload my file to it. This is the tool below, and it's only $18.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VAG-K-CAN-Commander-1-4-obd2-Diagnostic-Scanner-tool-COM-cable-For-VW-Audi-Skoda-/252862043229?hash=item3adfc0945d:g:X7AAAOSwJ7RYUMdC (http://www.ebay.com/itm/VAG-K-CAN-Commander-1-4-obd2-Diagnostic-Scanner-tool-COM-cable-For-VW-Audi-Skoda-/252862043229?hash=item3adfc0945d:g:X7AAAOSwJ7RYUMdC)

Now, since I legitimately have bought a cable before (3 actually from owning my shop), from what I've heard is legal since I essentially backed up a product I personally owned.

Just for my own liability, I can't recommend you take somebody else's protected work and clone it.

That being said, I just used MPROG to save the bin file from my vag k commander (so I can reprogram it later to use if needed), and then I uploaded the file I've attached here that is the file for the VCDS Hex Can cable, and VCDS recognizes it as a legitimate cable.

Just a heads up for those of you who need to "backup and restore your own cable"

I guess as far as K-line goes these cables are similar (it's just a UART control signal).
But you can't use a VAG-K cable for CAN with VCDS software, they both have different protocols which are proprietary.


Rgs H2Deetoo

What's the newest model year you can scan with this?

They do but the chip is a standard FTD I chip in both. I need to mess around with it more I kind of jumped the gun because Vagcom was recognizing it as a legitimate cable but when I tried to plug it into my sisters car it doesn't know that it's plugged into the car.

I'm not sure if it's because the chip inside my specific cable is not the same FTD I chip or what but what I load to do the test for a cable I hit test and it says cable phone not plug into your car I need to do some research or try other cars to see if it's just something wrong with her car is or what.

Yeah so it's not just my sisters car tried it on another car they didn't have aftermarket radio. This cable does have an LED And it lights green then turns red. Plugging it in doesn't change the LED green.

I still think it's close and could work because I was even able to go into device manager and installl the hexcan driver to it. When it's plugged into the computer, it identifies in device manager as being the Ross Tech cable, says it's working,etc.

I'm MPROG there are some settings for I/O controls and stuff that maybe o need to mess with...or maybe it ISNT possible? I also have some other cables I may try.

i'll admit that I really don't fully understand the internals and how they work, but if it's just the same FTDI FT232 are chip and I can install the driver I'm not sure why it wouldn't work? Can somebody explain the theory there to me?

The FTDI is juse the UART->RS232 conversion, nothing fancy.
Then the next step is you need to speak the right protocol for canbus, this is completely different.
K-Line simply uses one of the control signals like RTS and this is the same on both cables.

Vcds cables have an additional microcontroller on board, on top of the ftdi chip.

Even better: Any cable that has the possibility to talk to canbus *does* have an extra mcu.

Yeah I never got around to messing with it more. The really strange part is that VCDS seems to recognize the cable as a genuine Hex-Can cable, but it doesn't recognize the cable as being plugged into a vehicle. I don't know if this specific cable I used doesn't have the circuit for checking for ignition power or something, but that seems to be the main issue. Maybe I just need to provide 12v to one of the pins on this cable? Perhaps Can Bus cables don't generally have the circuit for sensing the 12v reference signal like k line cables do, so VCDS built that into their cable separately? I'm not entirely sure...