I did kind of a dumb thing the other day. I've been swapping over and swapping back my Unichip, and I got tired of disconnecting the battery when doing it. So the last time, I just disconnected it, starting with the big plug. The radiator fan immediately turned on - I assume to safeguard automatically against overheating? Thing is, it was -15°C... I immediately disconnected the battery, and went back to pulling the ECU.

Everything works fine - the radiator fan did not turn back on when I reconnected everything - but my CEL is on. I don't have an OBD reader, so I don't know what code it's throwing. (I know it sounds unlikely, but it's not the Unichip, which can throw codes; the only time it did that, it was because of the map I was running, and I reverted to the appropriate map, restarted the car five times, and all was well. Restarting five times hasn't helped with this one.) Anyone have any suggestions, short of buying an OBD reader? I intend to do so, I just haven't got around to it...

 

D'oh. Just figured out that I can buy a Scangauge II locally, in Canadian dollars, for less than I can buy it online in USD...and no shipping or duty, etc. So I'll go do that, and report back!

 

I KNEW IT!!! All I had to do was BUY a Scangauge II, and let the car sit for six hours, and...voilà! No more CEL. I haven't even plugged the thing in yet, and have pretty much no reason to, except now I'm thinking it looks pretty awesome...

 

Glad you got it cleared. Having the ScanGauge is worth it for future issues though. It's saved me a lot of worry in the past.

 

So I've read the manual that comes with the Scangauge... If it does even half of what the manual says I can learn to make it do, it's going to be pretty awesome! I'm pretty excited.

For the X-Gauge commands, what kind of OBD protocol does the first-gen Mini run? ISO, CANBUS, PWM...I have no idea what these things mean. I can't say that I'm looking forward to programming these, but...