How-To: Use the ABS Amigo V1 USB Tool to Read and Clear ABS Fault Codes from a Discovery II

Hi, my name is Storey Wilson and we are looking in the footwell of a 1999 Land Rover Discovery II.  This is the ABS Amigo, version 1, USB.  I am the designer and manufacturer of this diagnostic tool.  And I am going to show you today, quickly, how it works.

So this tool is designed to clear and read the ABS fault codes on a Land Rover Discovery II vehicle.  It is simply plugged into the OBDII port and it begins communications automatically, and it does all of its communications steps automatically.

Plug it in and we have some LED signals.  We have a red LED for transmit, a blue LED for receive, and a green LED illuminates when the process is complete. Now I will demonstrate that right now, hopefully we will be able to see it. So we plug it in, and the process begins.. red... red blue, transmit received, and when its complete, a green blinking LED. That's it!

So the ABS fault codes were just cleared and they were stored internally on this device.  In order to read these ABS fault codes, we then take it to a Windows PC and plug it in a USB port.  And I'll show you how thats done next.

I have just demonstrated the process of how to clear ABS fault codes from a Land Rover Discovery II vehicle.  And hopefully, once you have cleared those faults, you are then able to get your vehicle back up and running and in a situation where you can safely get your vehicle to a Land Rover dealership or a Land Rover technician.

Now the ABS Amigo has another trick up its sleeve.  Once you have used it under the normal function to clear the ABS fault codes, you can then take the ABS Amigo into an environment where you have a Windows PC and you can simply plug it into a UPS port on the Windows PC. Now once you plug it into a Windows USB port, it turns into a USB flash drive and on this USB flash drive - the text file containing the fault codes that were read from the ABS computer.

It's a very simple process - you take a mini B USB cable -- so this is a mini USB cable type "B" -- these are very common -- you probably have one already at your house.  They come with most digital cameras. So all you do is simply plug it in and when you plug it in it starts the USB enumeration process.  And the whole thing is complete -- no special drivers are needed, no special software needed.

Simply plug it in, the LED sequences begin, and you can hear that we now... the process is completed automatically in the background.  And that's it.  Now you are able to view the fault codes that were pulled from the ABS computer.

We are now looking at a Windows desktop environment.  I am going to show you further the steps that you would perform to work with the ABS diagnostic codes that were read from your Land Rover Discovery II.  So we used the ABS Amigo to pull the diagnostic trouble codes and now we are going to view them in the Windows environment.

We simply plug in the ABS Amigo to the USB port, like this. The process begins and enumerates and you'll notice a text file will appear.  So we have a flash drive.  The flash drive is named ABS Amigo.  And inside this flash drive there is a a text file. We simply open up this text file. Click, click.  And when you open up this text file you'll see that the text you'll see that the text contained within gives us more information about the fault codes that were on your ABS unit. And we see right here, in this first section, we see active faults and logged faults.  Now active faults, are, as the name implies, faults that are on your ABS controller, your ABS module, that are current and active. Whereas logged faults, so this fault that is the ECU ground reference fault, could be bumped into this logged fault section when it has been there for a certain number of vehicle cycles.  And you'll see faults kinda getting tossed back and forth between active and logged, depending on how severe the failure is in the ABS unit.

You'll also notice if we scroll down that the ABS Amigo box also controls, excuse me, also logs previous faults.  So as you read faults with the ABS amigo, they are bumped down -- a kind of a history -- so the ABS Amigo will keep a rolliing or running history of the fault codes that you have read from your ABS unit.  These are basically here - I put these here - to make sure that people could see the history of the faults being read so you could further diagnose your ABS problems.  And that's pretty much how the unit works.

So hopefully this answers some of your questions and you can see how it could be useful in an environment where you have an ABS fault and need to diagnose it and fix it.  So please do not hesitate to ask questions, email me, and visit my website, Thank You!  www.RSWSolutions.com

Transcribed with permission from Storey Wilson, RSW Solutions