Hi Stu_b, it would be easy to be cheeky like some device developers and lock it to one VIN but no, the intention was you could move it and the chosen obd adaptor to another vehicle and it should work fine. It reads the VIN and the use for that was to identify the vehicle as being one it has the correct IDs for to request the data needed as the wrong codes used will produce no results and the 1.6 for example uses different codes from the 2.0 to get the same data. The soot (and all other data) is read live from the ECU - I know for example that the 1.6 will get up to 24g of soot, at which point if the other conditions are right (more than 1/4 tank of fuel and up to temperature) then a regen will start and burn down will continue until the calculated soot is below 5g, though for example if you get down to 13g and then park up, stopping the regeneration, it will not restart the same regen until 24g is reached again.
70g of oil ash residue is also a max figure obtained from the data and the ECU would consider this 100% full and would no longer allow any regeneration to take place. You would get a warning light on the dash at that point. So the values I use are genuine and not estimated.
I first built an emulator which does a good job of pretending to be my van, and tested it against some industry standard tools, so I know the values are correct, but of course I have a 1.6 and that was the tricky one to do, as the uds codes are not in the public domain. Reverse engineering for many weeks was required to crack that nut.
Finally there is no device I can see which does the same thing in a compact display without using a mobile or android apps and even then, good luck getting the VW 1.6 to work with them (also the most common engine too) as the Simos code is very tightly guarded by Siemens. I haven't seen anything for other vehicle brands either.
The goal was to get a simple display, of live data, constantly on the dash so the user knows exactly what is going on. No fiddling with a mobile app while driving.
