What is VROOMFLASH J2534?
A lot of people in the Volvo community are moving away from DiCE units due to the increasing number of bad clone units on the market. It’s getting harder and harder to get actual “full chip” clone units, meaning with the correct internal hardware same as the original DiCE. Instead, people are using a J2534 cable that some people have dubbed SuperJ2534, etc. These cables are fully compatible for installing a tune or performance diagnostics/software download in VIDA. We have just started offering our own version of this cable we have dubbed VROOMFLASH J2534, which is the same as this, but we actually open the cable and modify the circuit board in order to improve the quality of the cable, replacing lower quality knockoff chips with genuine original hardware. The chips in question are the actual CAN bus and K-Line hardware.
The chips circled in red in this photo are the knockoff CAN and K-Line hardware devices.
To rework this cable, we start by removing the wires soldered directly to the capacitors. Note that the wire colors on this cable are actually swapped, so the orange (red) wire needs to be connected to the wire terminal on the board labeled black, and the black wire needs to be connected to the wire terminal labeled red. This is simply because the colors of the wires on the attached USB cable are incorrect. Now, we will apply hot glue to help strain relief the very small wires to the circuit board.
Next, we replace the bus hardware in question with the appropriate version of the hardware. The correct hardware version of the chips is as follows:
CAN Interfaces: MCP2515 (MCP2515-I/ST) 20-TSSOP
CAN Transceivers: VP251 (SN65HVD251DR) 8-SOIC
ISO9141 Transceivers: 9241A 8-SOIC (Chip is currently not available at this time, however, the in place version works okay and ISO9141 isn’t used for anything on Volvo except opening up CAN communications)
Lastly, we bridge the grounding pins on the OBD connector pins 4 and 5. Some vehicles use different grounding setups, so this makes the cable compatible with a wider range of vehicles.
Why are we telling you this?
We’re not in it to make money on cables. We are not a cable business. We only want customers to have access to a quality product that uses genuine hardware to communicate with vehicle busses in order to install our software and also perform diagnostics reliably, when needed. If you are the consummate DIYer and you would like to obtain and modify your own cable, we fully encourage you. We also sell the cable at cost to us unmodified as a Generic J2534 cable (no warranty, no returns, no refunds). If this is something you’re interested in, you can purchase this and modify the cable yourself (or not at all) or you can source your own cable. The bottom line is, we just want customers to have access to an inexpensive solution to install tunes and perform diagnostics. We provide the VROOMFLASH J2534 cables with a 60 day warranty.