Quote:
Originally Posted by Banana Clipper
Awesome because thats the 'guaranteed' one I got. They do 1-3 day First Class delivery too which is better than some of the ones coming from China.
Gave my other cable to a friend with an E46, seems to work on his car.
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Just plug the cable into your Windows laptop and let it "auto connect". Then go to Device Manager, find the cable under "Ports", go to Update Driver and select "Search automatically for updated driver software". It will download and install the correct/latest FTDI drivers. This worked for me on both Windows 7 and XP.
Unlike the Chinese cables, this cable does not include any software.
Remember the INPA and NCSExpert software is "Bootleg" and the copyright clearly belongs to BMW. While BMW seems to tolerate these forums, it is clearly illegal to include their software on anything sold; hence only the cables from China, Romania, etc come with INPA/NCSExpert software (of unknown versions).
The cables all include some version of the FTDI chip. I suspect that either a bootleg version of the FTDI chips or a rejected batch of chips is being used in the cheap Chinese cables that tend to be flaky. On some cars, if you install the cable in the correct order, they work, on other cars rarely if at all.
Finally, some INPA/NCSExpert disk or download gave me a D-Can.exe program. This talks to the cable and sets its COM port number and communication speed:
1. You select the COM port "1", "2", "3" (etc)
2. Enter "1" to "Write" the value.
3. Enter "1" to select the highest speed.
If the program returns "OK" then I have found INPA to work 100% of the time.
If the program returns an error, INPA never works - it might detect the battery and ignition, but will not communicate with any modules.
Personally I run on "COM3", but you need to then find the usb.ini file and change the COM port number. And this file needs to be in the Windows environment "path".
Hopefully this helps as I struggled quite a bit to get this all to work and computers and electronics are my business and hobby.