Bluetooth OBD II scanners for iPhone

This one:

$32 OBD2 Scanner & WIFI Car Code Reader – Clears Check Engine Light Instantly – Diagnose 3000 Car Codes - Wireless Car Diagnostic Scanner – Auto Scanner For 1996+ Vehicles (iOS & Android Devices Only) (1)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C3HAHCS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Excellent. Can you stream music while the app is open and connected to this? Any caveats to using it? I see some folks talking about the fact that it remains on and broadcasting wifi even with the car off.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Out of the box it breaks your internet connectivity since your phone tries to send traffic to the dongle. I manually set my network settings so there was no default gateway. I leave my wifi on all of the time, so when I jump in the truck and start it the app connects as soon as I open it.

It does broadcast when the engine is off. I figure someone would need to have the app to really do anything bad. Also as far as I know you can't communicate with anything other than the dongle when the car is off. I have to have the battery engaged to run diagnostics and pull codes.

It's worth mentioning sometimes the dongle just craps out and I can't connect without turning the car off and then back on. Not a huge deal since I'm just tracking commute statistics, but it's worth mentioning. Only headache is the app has to be open and displayed at all times (at least on iphone) otherwise it randomly stops working. It makes longer drives more annoying when you want to have maps pulled up.

You also have to remove a pin from the dongle if you want to leave it connected all of the time. I found starting the truck with the OBD reader connected causes the brake light to flash on the dash. I ended up buying an OBD extension cable and removed the pin from that. No issues since doing that.

I will say it's not worth buying OBD fusion's toyota expansion. IIRC I did it to monitor transmission temps, but found you could either use the expansion metrics or the included metrics, not both. So like you could monitor your transmission temp but not your fuel economy for example. It was pretty dumb. It might work, but I couldn't figure it out.

 

Awesome feedback. Thank you!