There were also some earlier PriusChat posts about the Openport suggesting that it lacked support for necessary protocols like K-line or KWP, or could not talk to some Prius ECUs that are behind gateways on the car's network. But it is a standard J2534 pass-through dongle, and that is what Techstream calls for, and sure enough, it works. That might have something to do with its origins more in the Mitsubishi and Subaru tuner communities. You don't hear very much about the Openport on this forum, not nearly as much as the Mini-VCI that seems to be mentioned every fifth post. They haven't been driven out of making their own product yet.)

But at least we have the option of ordering straight from the Tactrix store and being sure what we're getting. (Even they face a counterfeiting problem if you find something that claims to be an Openport 2.0 for significantly less, it's probably fake. Tactrix Openport 2.0:įrom the earlier research I'd been doing, it seemed that the only real, moderately-priced, USA-made option that you can still buy straight from the people who designed and built it is the Openport 2.0 from Tactrix in San Francisco. Probably depending on which 'Mini-VCI' they bought from which counterfeiter on eBay, and what their quality control was like. Sometimes they don't seem to have problems at all. I've heard that other people with Mini-VCIs don't have the same problems I had. The counterfeiters drove XHorse right out of their own business. The original Mini-VCI was made by XHorse, but I don't think you can even get an authentic one any more.

Last February, I almost threw the Mini-VCI down a well the fifth time in a row that it 'lost communication with vehicle' 90% of the way through a brake bleed procedure that had to be restarted from scratch every time.

Ironic, no? It would talk to all the fancy other ECUs in the car, but couldn't show me the engine rpm.

It would just say 'lost communication with vehicle'. With the Mini-VCI, I could never, ever get the active data list for the engine control module.That really was helpful, and it has gotten me through all of the maintenance on my Gen 3 that I've needed to do over the last year. About a year ago, while I was feeling very indecisive about all the choices of cheap eBay dongles (mostly clones of the XHorse Mini-VCI) that might or might not work well with my car and Techstream, I was helped out by someone who had already been down that road, and picked out for me an old beater Windows 7 laptop and a Mini VCI and took care of all the installation for me.

Tactrix openport 2.0 ebay