Connecting your smartphone to your car with an OBD2 Bluetooth dongle is easy if you know these tricks.
- Good Quality OBD2 Bluetooth Dongle
- Pair the OBD2 Bluetooth Dongle with Phone Settings First
- Download a Quality OBD2 scanner app.
OBD2 Bluetooth dongle
Most important point of all is to get a quality dongle. This means paying around 20Euro or more for a product like VGate.
There are cheaper OBD2 Bluetooth dongles on ebay but in our experience they can be slow, unreliable and do not recognise all the data that the car is able to give. We learned the hard way until we discovered the VGate2 OBD2 dongle. It’s fast, it’s reliable and it picks up everything the car is giving (in our experience). It more expensive but it is worth every penny.
Connecting to the dongle
A big problem people have is connecting their phone to their Bluetooth dongle. They open the app and find they can not connect their phone to it.
The trick here is to pair your phone with the Bluetooth dongle before you even open your OBD2 scanner app. Only when the phone has been paired should you attempt to connect with the dongle through the OBD2 scanner app.
OBD2 Scanner app
And last but not least, we need a app that can talk with our Bluetooth dongle. Trust me, we have tried loads of free apps from the Google Play store and none of them were exactly what we were looking for.
That was until we found “Car Scanner“. This OBD2 scanner app exceeded our expectations. It does everything we want and more. It’s brilliant.
And that is what you need to get connected with your car’s OBD2 port using Bluetooth and a smartphone.
Summary – OBD2 Bluetooth
With this Bluetooth dongle and this app you will be able to read and clear fault codes, you will be able to log data in real time and store the data to a .csv file for analysis after (with logworks for example). And you will be able to create a virtual dashboard on your phone which is completely customisable.
And all for around 30 Euro, not bad!