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Originally Posted by Shredjim
Excellent review and write up Scott! Question - you seem very well read and tech savy, and I think I believe I remember you were heading down the road of buying the tools and doing the coding yourself. What caused you to purchase the remote service instead?
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Originally Posted by themishmosh
Yup, remote coding is really pretty neat and definitely convenient.
Another interesting development in tech is the BMWhat app. I think what you can code with it is limited now though and certainly the question of OBD interface that'll work with our car leaves me pause.
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Originally Posted by Can_Car
So is there no software available that allows coding with an easy to use interface that can be done by yourself? It's great that coding can be done remotely but many guys I know that have Volkswagens just buy the software and do this kind of stuff themselves.
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I've looked a bit into coding, and it seems that is something anyone who is a little tech savvy can figure out. As long as that person has some time to burn and is looking for a new hobby, ha. Right now in my life, that's not really me, though I did consider it. As far as I can tell, there is an app you can buy that orchestrates the process, but it *isn't* a dead simple affair of checking boxes, it requires a fair bit of learning, as entire forums with tens of thousands of posts seem to testify to. Also, it only runs on Windows. And you still have to buy a cable. And, it is possible to screw your car up if you don't know what you are doing--so it's not something you want to charge into recklessly on your daily driver. Sooooo, you can totally do it yourself, but it's something that will require a fair bit of time and money. I can see the appeal of learning how to do it . . . in ten years. In the mean time, I'll just pay someone who knows exactly how to do it and who has tons of experience $70 every three years and be merrily on my way.
As for the BMWhat app, I almost committed to it, but decided in the end not to pay the $50. I had the OBDII Wifi Dongle already (
this one), but BMWhat can't code the iDrive, so it wouldn't help with the nag screen, my complaint numero uno. Also, using the lite version of the app, it was very slow and unreliable, which gave me pause. I'm not sure if it was due to the dongle I was using or the app itself, but ultimately it doesn't matter as long as the end result is not great. The dongle does work perfectly with the OBD Fusion app though, so . . .