I'm looking into getting hp tuners. Do you need to use their branded bluetooth obd2 interface to do it? I already have a fairly nice obd dongle as well as an Ethernet to OBD cable. Their dongle seems horribly overpriced, but I'm having trouble finding information if there is something special about it in the flood of marketing results on google. Anyone successfully tuned on a 3rd party dongle? If so, what was it?

 

Yes, their unit, or use pcm hammer white what u got, and it’s free

 

Yes, you need their dongle to use HPT software. It's much more capable than a cheapy obd2 (elm327 dongle), but it's all proprietary so you're locked to HPT software. This is the easiest, most streamlined solution-- a nice commercial product, but yes it costs more money. You read your PCM, it recognizes the file structure and it loads up automatically with matching definition file. Similarly the scanner works very well and very automated and easy to use for a wide range of cars.

The alternative is something like PCM hammer as already mentioned. Free program, which is awesome, but the learning curve is much more steep. Probably not a big deal for someone who's been tuning for years. Someone brand new to it all will really feel the learning curve, when you need to go out and find a matching XDF (definition file), how to set up tunerpro to correct checksum on file save and such to make it all work. With PCM hammer you can use a generic ELM327 device as you talk about, but they are quite slow, and while some get it to work, I could never properly read the ECU with my OBDLink MX without removing the pcm from the car. OBDX Pro is a dongle made specifically for this now and is the way to go. I haven't used it personally... I already had HPT (and efilive) at this point, so I never really dug into open source as much.

https://obdxpro.com/