Hi all,
My first post here as new to Multiecuscan but an electronics engineer by trade.
Been trying to figure out why this resistor across the CAN bus lines can possibly be a common issue with many of these devices.
It looks like Most of the problematic devices use the NXT TJA 1040T chip as the CAN transceiver.
http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/TJA1040.pdf Here's the datasheet for this device
I think the problem all along is that the datasheet has been initially misinterpreted / badly translated. If you look at page 8 you will see a circuit describing "Stabilization circuitry and application" This shows two 60 ohm resistors in conjunction with the 'SPLIT' pin of the chip. This is a suggested circuit to reduce Radio Frequency Interference problems. The designers of these ELM boards have made a short cut and used a single 120 ohm resistors and completely omitted the SPLIT part. WRONG!!
Why I think the interface still works with the resistor in place on some vehicles but not on others depends on the actual CAN voltages that the vehicles ECU's can cope with. The TJA 1040T, the datasheet tells us, can cope with a range of -27 to +40 Volts! The 120 ohm resistor will have the effect of suppressing any signals coming in and going outon the CAN bus. Some vehicles modules will be able to cope with this (I bet the resistor has the potential to get quite warm at times), others clearly don't.
This makes me think that the resistor could be quite safely 'taken out' by temporarily putting a DC voltage between pins 14 and 6 of the OBD plug on the device without even having to open it up!
I'd suggest 12v would give one eigth of a watt resistor 1.2 watts which should be more than enough to shorten its life to a couple of seconds. Anyone willing to give it a try
