Lexia2 & Diag2000

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cranor
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Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

Dear members,

I discovered this forum while looking for information about Lexia2 and Diag2000.
I am currently working on a project for the implementation of diagnosis protocols used by PSA in Peugeot and Citroen without OBDII.
The work is not easy, I have got some information about protocols, times and commands to send for Sagem SL96 and an Airbag calculators which returns me fault codes (in format which requires few transformation) and I am able to erase faults, read some motors information like temperature, intake air pressure, speed and rpm.

I would like to go ahead in discovering commands and understanding answers from calculators (data need some unknow conversion/interpretation).
To accomplish this, I have bought an "old" Lexia2 with a dead hard drive.
The hard drive will be replaced but will require a copy of installation CDs or ghost image of functioning Lexia2 and Diag2000 (I hope it will work on Lexia2 hardware).
I already found pp2000 starting and after version 04.A_03-2004 but need previous versions called Diag2000 (02, 03 and maybe before were built on Windows 3.11 if I am not wrong).

I have seen some people on this forum having Ghosts for Lexia2 and Diag2000. Some of them use both softwares on the same hardware platform (hope they could help me).

If you think you can help me by sharing your Ghosts or CDs, please do not hesitate.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by spider »

I think most of the clones use Diagbox. I've never seen the older Diag2000 software on a stand alone PC, it was part of the smaller handheld (or on a trolley) units. I do seem to recall though it was either 3.11 or 95 based behind all that although substantially modified to hide it, I suspect 3.11

Also be aware as far as I know Diag2000 will not work with any plexed cars, that was part of the reason I think we had to replace ours (all three! although only one worked properly and reliably really)
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

Thanks Spider for your answer,

I am not trying any install on a generic laptop, I have got a handheld Lexia 2 to repair, the official hardware without the trolley.

I am trying to make it work so I could observe data exchanges on link, find the conversion algorithm for fault codes and so on..

My targets will only be cars not compliant with OBDII.
For example, on my 406 it is a K-line with lines as described in ISO9141-2 and a simple PSA protocol to handle data frames.

Still looking for Lexia2 & Diag2000 CDs and/or Ghosts :)
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

I extracted the hard disk from the lexia, it is a 2GB Toshiba hdd.
It gave me some signs of life when plugged it on a laptop using a usb to ide bridge and contains 3 partitions (FAT, NTFS, FAT).

The ntfs was damaged and appeared empty. The soft "GetDataBack for NTFS" was able to recover files (1GByte).

This system is using Windows XP embedded and the version of lexia is 36.14 (CD-ROM 36 V36.14).

I will make a clone disk with higher capacity.

Anyone knows how to access the bios parameters ?

There is a DSUB connector labeled USB, if someone has the adapter, I am interested by a picture of it.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by red_dwarfers »

There was a member who had a bit of trouble with his Lexia 2 when the BIOS battery died and I seem to remember him saying he had trouble resetting the time. So from that I assume he had trouble getting into the BIOS too.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by Mandrake »

cranor wrote:Thanks Spider for your answer,

I am not trying any install on a generic laptop, I have got a handheld Lexia 2 to repair, the official hardware without the trolley.

I am trying to make it work so I could observe data exchanges on link, find the conversion algorithm for fault codes and so on..

My targets will only be cars not compliant with OBDII.
For example, on my 406 it is a K-line with lines as described in ISO9141-2 and a simple PSA protocol to handle data frames.

Still looking for Lexia2 & Diag2000 CDs and/or Ghosts :)
I don't want to discourage your efforts to get a broken genuine Lexia 2 to work, but if the whole point of the exercise is to have a working Lexia so that you can monitor and reverse engineer the over the wire protocols, you may be better off just getting one of the readily available chinese Lexia 3 clones that many of us on the forum have - they're not exactly expensive (between around £80-120 depending on model, software version and where you buy) and the better ones like the one from easy diagnostics come with the latest versions of Diagbox and Lexia software fully working, so will do far more than a genuine Lexia 2 which will be running very outdated versions of the Lexia software with no easy way to update it.

You could spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to resuscitate that Lexia 2 and still not succeed, hindering your objective of having a working Lexia to reverse engineer the protocols...just my opinion. :)
Simon

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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by CitroJim »

red_dwarfers wrote:There was a member who had a bit of trouble with his Lexia 2 when the BIOS battery died and I seem to remember him saying he had trouble resetting the time. So from that I assume he had trouble getting into the BIOS too.
That was me Kev, the BIOS battery went flat and the RTC chip then generated very random datetimes which the Embedded windows could not cope with.

I never managed to get into the BIOS and ended up scrapping the Lexia2 and got a Lexis3 clone. Which oddly I barely use because it's a lot easier to just plug in an ELIT when I need a quick diagnostic...
Jim

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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

First of all, I would like to thank you for having took the time to read and answer.
red_dwarfers wrote:There was a member who had a bit of trouble with his Lexia 2 when the BIOS battery died and I seem to remember him saying he had trouble resetting the time. So from that I assume he had trouble getting into the BIOS too.
First time I ran the hardware after having restored the ntfs partition, it told me "invalid argument to time encode" but at next boot, this message disappeared and it stucked on a page with "please wait" as message for a while, then an error on IHMWIN said "Access violation ... in module 'cw3215.DLL'...."

I am nearly sure that the problem comes from the software and requires only a restore from CD.
It has 32MB of RAM memory that will be upgraded soon to see if cw3215.dll could crash due to lack of RAM.
Mandrake wrote:I don't want to discourage your efforts to get a broken genuine Lexia 2 to work, but if the whole point of the exercise is to have a working Lexia so that you can monitor and reverse engineer the over the wire protocols, you may be better off just getting one of the readily available chinese Lexia 3 clones that many of us on the forum have
[...]

You could spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to resuscitate that Lexia 2 and still not succeed, hindering your objective of having a working Lexia to reverse engineer the protocols...just my opinion. :)
Indeed Mandrake, buying a PPS2000/LEXIA3 could be a solution, but there are two reasons to focus my work on old diag2000 and lexia 2 :

- first one, logically : the price. It's a personal project and I admit to not want to invest and "spend" a lot of money.

- second reason : I am interesting in only old (K-line) protocols, CAN doesn't interest me. The new software is more complicated, Analyzing databases, DLLs and drivers requires more time even if there are some similarities mainly in the way drivers are handled.
Decoding a protocol is not as easy as sniffing communications.

A simple example : I requested live parameters from a SL96 calculator (the motor is stopped and not ran since the previous day) and it answered with a 27 bytes length frame.
A fragment of this frame is [0x09] [0x03] [0xA1] [0x98] [0x55] [0x71]
This doesn't help me without knowing that the first two bytes are temperature of water followed by the inlet air pressure temperature but all data needs conversion.
The next bytes (0xA1) is the battery voltage but 0xA1 in hex value gives 161.. 161 what ? Looking inside the DLL handling a part of the diagnosis gave me a useful information : the value has to me multiplied by 0.073.
So we have 161x0.073 = 11,753 volts (yes the battery level was a bit low).

The last byte (0x71) is a value for the O2 sensor, and the dll tells me it has to be multiplied by 9.8 and that the unit is mV.

This was just a simple example, sometime interpretation on data and conversions are more complicated like converting fault codes to understandable fault codes.
The ECU doesn't answer with codes in the format of P12345 but something like 5678 which has to be converted using a conversion table that is inside the DLL and then have to run a SQL query (on the database).

So I hope you understand that observing communications won't tell me which bytes correspond to what data and how to obtain the final results.


Else, I am sure the new interfaces can do more things and be used on much more cars but almost all have now CAN based interfaces.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by Mandrake »

I understand what you're saying about the software being more complicated to analyse, however If you haven't seen a Lexia 3 running the latest Diagbox software you might not realise that Diagbox only acts as a launcher when used with older cars such as the Xantia which don't use CAN bus - diagbox simply launches the older Lexia software as a separate standalone application and waits in the background until the Lexia executable is closed.

This standalone Lexia application is the same as that used with a Lexia 2, complete with the chunky interface with yellow buttons, albeit possibly a slightly later version. (The Lexia executable bundled within Diagbox 6.24 is Lexia 500.44) As far as I know it should be possible to launch the Lexia application directly without launching Diagbox, so it could be run in a debugger, although I have not tried that.

Diagbox only natively supports later CAN bus models like C4 or late C5 and onwards. The Lexia 3 hardware interface of course supports both CAN bus and all the older protocols, right back to the two wire protocol used in early XM's, BX and so on.

Certainly price is a consideration. Good luck getting it to work, I think you'll find it hard to find a copy of the software as not many people have genuine Lexia 2's.
Simon

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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

That's a new information I will take into consideration.

I have a copy of diagbox and PPS installed (without hardware).
I didn't imagine the new version could include an old version but it is maybe an "interface emulation".
Have to look deeply inside.

Thanks again
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

I connected a PS2 keyboard inside the Lexia2, when IHMWIN shows the error message, I press "Enter" then do a "ALT+F4" to kill the task and it is launched again without any error so the Lexia seems to work fine.

I also added an Ethernet and an USB ports using the rear LAN/USB connector without having the original cable (both not yet tested)

Tomorrow I will try to run it on my 406 (by chosing the correct ECU under xantia).

And I am still looking for CDs (or Ghost) of Diag2000 and Lexia2
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by CitroJim »

I think I may still have a ghost of Lexia2 CD35 knocking around...

I'll have to fire up my archive store and see. Won't be just yet but if I have I'll let you know...

I may also have a PP2000 ghost too but can't be sure yet...
Jim

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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

Thank you CitroJim,

Years ago, I remember these full "old" versions to be available on emule and as torrent.
Now, copies of PPS are sold so only new versions can be found.

I would be grateful for your help.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by cranor »

I have got a setup/update CD (version 39) for lexia2 but it is not the recovery disk (the one with the ghost file at \RC\IMAGES\XPE.GHO).
IHMWIN still crashs with CW3215.DLL, but I am able to bypass it with alt+f4.

@CitroJim: did you have the time to take a look at your archive ? I am mostly interested by the diag2000 if you still have it.

Does someone know how to use a newer hard drive ? all those i have tried do not boot the ntfs partition (due to the strange disk geometry : 66heads, 63 or 64 sectors).
Or any way to activate and enter into the bios setup ?

I however succesfully booted a slax distribution from a hard drive and the USB adapter I made is working well.
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Re: Lexia2 & Diag2000

Post by CitroJim »

cranor wrote: @CitroJim: did you have the time to take a look at your archive ? I am mostly interested by the diag2000 if you still have it.
As usual these days I completely forgot.. Sorry :oops:

I'll have a look later this afternoon when I'm back home... And if I don't, PM me and remind me :wink:
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