After being an indepth tuner in the past, I was very excited to use Torque on my Motorola Xoom with my 2009 G8 GT. However, I hate to say that I’ve been somewhat disappointed, mostly in regards to the speed of the interface. The maximum speed I’ve seen is 17 PIDs/second according to the diagnostics page. This may be fine for those using a phone since the number of gauges would be limited by screen size, but the Xoom has a large screen that I was hoping to stack with gauges, only to find out that the update speed is very slow when displaying more than a handful of gauges. I’m used to the old obsolete serial interfaces, which, for whatever reason, seem to operate multiple times quicker than through bluetooth with Torque. I just checked a scan from using a serial interface, and I was getting update speeds of about 65 PIDs/second.

Is this a limitation of Torque, the specific adapter, or the bluetooth protocol? From what I’ve read, the bluetooth protocol speed should accommodate much faster communication, even considering comm overhead, but I’m definitely not that knowledgeable in bluetooth. I just find it amazing that the speed of communication can’t meet something that was developed decades ago. What kind of read speed is everyone else getting? Has anyone figured out a way to increase the speed, aside from removing gauges? I’m not jumping to conclusions and blaming Torque for this since it could very well be a bluetooth issue, but I’m hoping there may be some solution for faster communication.

I will admit, it is a semi-cheap ebay adapter. Can someone direct me to one that will run faster and give me some idea of how many PIDs/sec to expect with it? I would quite happily have bought a more expensive one in the first place if I had known I could get significantly higher speeds.

Thanks for the reply, you’ve given me hope!

Hi, thought I’d chime in as this may help,..

The ELM327/clone adapters top out at about 19 PIDs/second from what I’ve seen on a number of ECUs, however this is also fairly ECU dependant on how fast the ECU provides the PIDs and the protocol used.

OBDKey and ScanTool use their own firmware. OBDKey can hit up to 22 PIDs/second (on a non-restricted ECU) and have seen the scantool adapter hit 25PIDs/sec.

At the moment, the scantool adapter is the fastest, when the ECU/protocol is not the bottleneck (and on the same ECU using different adapters, the scantool.net adapter still provides a consistently faster read speed)

If you want Torque to update at the fastest rate, make sure you tick the ‘faster communication’ setting in Torque’s ‘OBD2 Adapter settings’. This can have a dramatic effect on PID read speeds. but may cause some poorly made clone adapters to crap-out and work intermittently/pause/stop.

This 65 PIDs/second was it monitoring 1 PID or on one specific ECU type what tool was used? (main reason is that I doubt 65/sec unless they were using a special vehicle specific protocol on the ECU)

There may be more to add to this in the future.

Hi Ian, thanks for the response! The 65 PIDs/second was monitoring a large group of different regular and enhanced PIDs on my previous vehicle (2003 Grand Prix GTP) with a DHP PowrTuner, which utilized a serial interface that I connected through a keyspan usb to serial adapter. The DHP interface could be used with virtually any GM vehicle of that generation. I used a few other systems for scanning as well, including Car-Code with the Alex Pepper adapter and an HP Tuner, both of which had approximately the same read speed on that car. Note that this was obviously an older GM system (i.e. not CANbus), but with the new CANbus system being able to handle high speed data output, it tells me that there seems to be some inherent issue with either the bluetooth interface or how the program interprets the communication, one of which is acting as a bottleneck (I’m assuming it’s bluetooth that’s the issue).

If you would like, I can send you a scan that I recorded with one of the interfaces I previously listed if you’d like to see the type and number of PIDs that I’m looking for and previously scanned.

Hi

Unfortunately posting scans from other apps would fall under the DMCA, and would be technically illegal, so please do not do that.

I’m confused again. My 2003 Grand Prix GTP has a single PCM and has a max of ~15 PIDs/second. My 2009 G8 GT has separate ECM and TCM and also has a max of ~15 PIDs/second. However, I scanned a 2004 Trailblazer LT, which has a single PCM, and got 55 PIDs/second and blazing fast gauge refresh rate…

Something definitely doesn’t seem right. Why can it communicate with some vehicles so much faster than others? The Trailblazer and Grand Prix use the same series of PCM, but I can get almost four times the read rate on the Trailblazer. To me this sounds like an issue with how Torque is handling the protocols.

Ideas? The Trailblazer definitely only has a single PCM for both the engine and transmission, so the idea that it’s communicating with multiple modules does not apply. The read rates from it are similar to what I’ve experienced with wired solutions, and I’d love to get the same performance on my GTP and G8 GT.

So… this bug… did it functionally double the PID read speed, or just incorrectly display the speed on the adapter status page? If it actually caused the speeds to be 55/sec, I would love to have that bug apply to all of my vehicles