Which wired USB to OBDII dongle works for PCM Hammer? My bluetooth OBDLink MX+ gave constant bluetooth connectivity issues with windows. Looking for a wired solution.

Has anyone used Vgate vLinker?

OBD Link EX?

 

i dont think we can link to non sponsor but just google "obdx pro vx" . that's the cheapest one at $80. unfortunately out of stock right now but looks like it should be back in stock at the end of february

 

+1 for the OBDX Pro VX. Works great. I have a VT here that also works well if you can find it used somewhere.

Rick

 

I'm using the Vgate vLinker FS OBD2 USB Adapter . It was $30 bucks off amazon. Been working great. It says it's made for "ForScan" which is ford, but chat GPT said it would work, and it did. I went tot he Vgate website, downloaded the drivers, installed and restarted my PC. Not sure if I needed to do any of that.


In PCM Hammer when you have to select your device I just picked "Obdlink or AllPro". Didn't even bother trying other selections.



Anyway, I've done a couple full read/writes with it and no errors or issues at all so far.

 

Thanks for the confirmation. I just tried the Vgate vLinker FS OBD2 USB Adapter and it worked perfectly with PCM Hammer on my P59 PCM. For $35 I don't see a better deal than this.

 

So I was able to write quickly. But reading is turning out to be a problem; it is taking a very long time and just timing out. I updated the drivers from their website and the other ftdichip.com site and nothing changed, still remained super slow and failed to do a full read with PCM hammer.

 

Make sure your Com Port setting Baud Rate matches the Vgate vLinker (115200). Also, make sure you use USB 2.0 port (A plain trident symbol usually indicates USB 2.0) Also set your Latency Timer to 1ms and make sure your Receive/Transmit Buffers are set to 4096 Bytes

 

OBDX makes the best interfaces, so that's what I always recommend. That said, a wired interface for $35ish is kinda neat.

I'm guessing that this Forscan adapter uses the same chip as some of the ObdLink devices, maybe an STN1110 or something like that.

Can someone who has one please copy-paste the first few lines that PCM Hammer prints, when it connects to the device? I'm curious as to which version of the STN11__ chip it has.

Thanks!

 

[QUOTE
Can someone who has one please copy-paste the first few lines that PCM Hammer prints, when it connects to the device? I'm curious as to which version of the STN11__ chip it has.

Thanks![/QUOTE]

 

Thanks for the instructions here, however even after doing this it remains extremely slow to read and now just times out when trying to read entire PCM. Both of my USB ports on my laptop however are USB 3.0 and not USB 2.0.

I purchased the bluetooth vgate Vlinker MS module, and it is performing similarly to the wired version. It writes quickly, but also times out trying to read.

Here are the first few lines from the bluetooth MS version:

[03:52:13:764] PCM Hammer 021
[03:52:13:773] Friday, February 20 2026 @03:52:13:77
[03:52:15:516] Thanks for using PCM Hammer.
[03:52:16:826] Voltage: 12.3V
[03:52:16:830] Elm ID: ELM327 v2.3
[03:52:16:874] ScanTool device ID: STN2120 v5.8.1

 

According to what little information I have, the STN1170 is equivalent to the chips in the ObdLink SX and LX, but the STN2120 should be able to support sending and receiving larger messages, which should make it a bit faster. However, a code change will be required to take advantage of that, and it will take some testing to validate that change. I've ordered a VGate VLinker to experiment with, but I can't promise when I'll get around to it.

Also, these devices, and the ObdLink devices, suffer from an issue where they miss incoming messages from other modules in the vehicle during the "everybody shut up, okay?" step of the flash process, which means they could miss a "no I won't shut up" message from another module, and that module could subsequently interrupt the read or write. I haven't seen that happen in my own vehicle but I do wonder if that's what causes issues in other vehicles.