black00WS6

My car had been down for over 6 months until this past weekend. Before I started it, I was going to load a new program in for bigger injectors. We had a battery charger hooked up, and I forgot my key was on. I plugged the LS1 edit cable into the car and start to put it in the serial port of my laptop, then ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. PC got fried. Has anyone heard of this happening before?

ChrisB

Did you have your lapotp hooked up to a power inverter?

black00WS6

The laptop was hooked up with its power supply. It's under warranty so I'm not too upset, but I just dont want it to happen again when I load in a program.

SS SLP2

iTrader: (8)

BE sure key not ON and do not program with charger connected, repete NO charger , I connect a extra battery with jumper cables to insure power while programing

ChrisB

It would have to be some *nasty* spikes from the charger to kill your laptop - I honestly have never heard of that happening (that is how I read your post - your laptop died).


Stay away from the battery charger and you should be fine though (hopefully).

black00WS6

yea, it's dead. It stunk pretty bad but good thing its still under warranty. I just hope the cable didnt get fried too. I'm going out tomorrow with an old win9x laptop to try to get it to work so we'll see....

JRcamaroZ28

iTrader: (41)

Just so i got this right when using Edit you dont want the car battery hooked to a charger but its ok to have the laptop hooked up to a alternate power source like a wall outlet right? I just want to make sure before i start in on using Edit and since my laptops battery only lasts maybe 20-35mins. depending on the load of work

JR

Black LS1 T/A

If you use a battery charger, it must be the trickle kind of charge mode. A charger that is in fast charge or "jump" mode will make the voltage too high and can damage your PCM.

black00WS6

Well carputing emailed me to let me know that certain power supplies for laptops can damage the ls1 edit cable and/or computer. In my case, it fried the computer and also fried the cable. Now on their website, it says they have NO WARRANTY... so hopefully I wont get stuck with having to rebuy FOUR licenses for the cable.....

WS6 GreeN

Yeah, that would totally suck. If carputing can't do any better than make a cable that gets damaged from powering your PC, they need to go back to the drawing board IMO... Thats one reason I'll wait for another tuning solution.

ChrisB

Andrew can probably answer this much better than me, but some power supplies actually give you a much higher potential ground than others - so your "ground" on the PC could actually be +12V in comparison to the ground on the car - so thin your "grounding" pins end up sinking a +12V current - and since they weren't designed to do that the thing fries.

That said I have done what you describe many times without problem. You can probably take the connector as it plugs into the PCM and use a DVM to measure the potential between both grounds - this should give you an idea if there is a problem.

Carputing probably says "no warranty", as it is definitely possible to fry your pcm with ls1edit, and if they had a full warranty people would undoubtedly try and get them to pay for rental car, time down, repairs, etc. I would definitely talk to ken first about the situation and see what he has to say with regards to fixing your cable.

black00WS6

They told me they would replace the cable for 100. I guess from now on, I wont be using a power supply for my laptop, just run it from the battery from now on.

Cal

iTrader: (1)

Yep what happened is you got a ground loop since you had both the car and the laptop on external power sources. Some people get away with it because some power supplies have an issolated ground, but you can't count on that. Stick to battery power only! Or at least have only one or the other powered from an AC source, but not both. Like the other guy said, use an extra car battery with jumper cables if you need more power to keep the PCM going. Battery chargers do by design put out nasty spikes, and the voltage used for charging a battery is way too high for flashing the PCM.