Uber-easy DIY USB ALDL Cable

[tony-baroni]

I've been working on getting my van properly running before I can try tuning since getting the cable to work. And then the cable stopped working! One of the conductors solder joints broke from being moved around in my backpack. I soldered it back up, epoxied the cable, and figured it was good. Not quite!

When I startup tunerpro, and check the cable with the tools utility, it checks out good. It shows the selected port as COM4.

Then when I hit the connect to the vehicle icon, the program shows Connecting in the lower status window, but it never connects. At that point, if I go back into the utility to check the cable, it shows the selected port as {COM4}, and it fails the check. This is repeatable.

The other item I noticed, is when TunerPro starts to try to connect, the Rx and Tx LED's on the sparkfun FTDI board start to flash, one flashes red and the other flashes green.

The connections look good on the cables. I need to verify that I've resoldered the broken connection to the correct line next. Perhaps someone hear knows why the brackets are changing on the COM port? That might be a good clue...