DIY Greddy Emanage Blue Cable from Scratch

Quite some time ago during some emission’s failures I sought a way to interact with my greddy emanage blue. I had tried other DIY’s but they were somewhat unclear and I never had results. I set out to see the full picture and work with the right parts instead of hoping that a specific usb phone cable would be the part I was looking for. Here, and I must say I’m a bit late with this older system, I will try my best to provide a detailed description on the wiring and a guide on how to achieve the creation of this cable which would otherwise cost over 150$ USD from Greddy dealers. The Greddy Emanage cable is NOT just a simple USB-USB, and it is also not the run of the mill usb-serial connector. What it really is, is described later.

Guide Requirements:

-Basic wiring/soldering skills
-Laptop with Windows XP (or similar)
-Willingness to buy parts from eBay (Rs232 TTL converter)
-Spare USB cable to cut up (USB-A, the flat rectangular kind)

Step 1 – Acquire Parts

You will need a USB-A cable, just one end. If you can, find an older piece of computer equipment you dont need (i.e. a mouse) and cut the end off, leave as much length as you can. The other piece of the puzzle is a 5-volt RS232 to TTL Converter. These are rather common and can be found locally if you have a good electronics shop, otherwise eBay works great. There are hundreds of these listed, often below $10.00 USD (shipping included).

The standard serial port communicates with voltages levels -/+10v, however communication with the Emanage requires a range of 0-5v as it is a Logic Level device. You will need one of these that will accept an operating voltage of 5 volts.

Step 2 – Construct

Strip your usb cable, there will be a foil and/or braided meshjust below the plastic. Using your hands pull this back and unravel it to reveal the four wires on the inside. They are most commonly coloured as red/black/white/green though can be any colour combination. You can simply cut off the mesh/foil shielding for this. Strip the end of every wire (very little needs to be showing, perhaps 2 or 3 mm.

It’s time fire up the solder gun. Look at your converter and find where the +5, Ground, tx and rx outputs are.  They should be labelled or your part should have instructions. Here is where the USB connector wires should go to, use the chart and the image pinout of the usb to link it all together.

USB Side	Converter Side
vcc	+5V
data –	rx
data +	tx
GND	Ground

Be sure to use a multimeter to check that you really have vcc, or gnd, etc before soldering into the board. Here is a picture of my end result:

Step 3 – Software

Emanage can be downloaded from this emanage group on yahoo. Sign up, and download e-manage149.EXE as well as v1.11.rar. Use winrar (provided on same group) to extract v1.11.rar then find and run the setup.exe. Following that run e-manage149.EXE, it will ask for an extraction directory and defaults to a temporary directory. This must be changed, change this to an area such as c:\temp. I’ve never found this update to install correctly, often failing with non-english errors. When that happens, exit out of it, and navigate to the directory where the files were extracted to. Copy all files except eUp.ini and eUp.exe. Move these files over top of where you installed the management tool 1.11 (defaults to C:\Program Files\TRUST\GReddy e-manage support tool).

Step 4 – TUNE

Plug the cable into your computer before loading the program. Turn on the car (ACC) and then start emanage. Once connected its all up to you. The program may ask for a main unit update, in which case allow it to do so. If it prompts for a file, select the one that shows up in the dialog box or look for one within the emanage program directory.

TROUBLESHOOTING / QUESTIONS

I hope you don’t have to read this, fortunately I ran accross many problems and maybe I have a fix for you.

The tool reports itself as online, but when I try to do anything it says “MAIN UNIT UPDATE” and “Corresponding… Please Wait”
I had this happen when the rx and tx wires were backwards. I’ve heard others having this problem, I think they just had the wires backwards. Also ensure your emanage is at its latest.

It keeps asking for a password, why?
Greddy’s preconfigured maps are protected so they can’t be tampered with. Simply overwrite the map to get past this. I believe a main unit update may do the same as well (communications menu)

Can I use a USB – Serial adapter for this?
Yes, I have used one with no troubles. Most newer laptops do not have the serial port.

Still not working…
Still? Time to check the wiring. You’ll want to go as far back as checking the serial port from your computer. There is a method called a loopback test. Essentially this involves using windows hyperterminal and jumping the correct pins, and making sure the data the computer sends out routes back to itself. If you see an ‘echo’ of what was typed, you know its working up until that point. It takes some detail, but there are PLENTY of resources on it. Start here.

After the serial loopback test is confirmed working (if not your laptop is busted). Its time to do a Converter side loopback test. This involves the same idea. Put the converter into your serial port and jump tx and rx wires, this wont work until the board is fed with voltage (5v). An easy way to supply voltage is to get two wires with stripped ends, rig three AA batteries together in series and use electrical tape to get a wire at each end on the contact. Then put the positive wire to V5 on the board and the negative side to the GD (ground). Run loopback test and ensure your converter works. To do all this it is likely easier to cut off the USB side and strip the ends of the wires to get easier contacts then reconnect everything once tested working.

If the serial port and converter both test working, then the problem is likely with the port settings in emanage. Make sure your using the right COM port (or just try each one). You can also navigate to control panel -> system -> device manager -> Ports and play with the settings there. I believe the most common settings are 9600 bits per second, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, and no flow control for best results.

Good luck! If this has helped you let me know!

*Added 7/10/2012*

Download – Greddy Turbo Kit Installation Instructions (Acura Integra)
Download – Greddy Emanage Software Manual
Download – v1.11 Emanage
Download – v1.49 Emanage Update