Setting up an OBD Reader for Indian motorcycles

I have been forced to adapt to the ways of the EFI people and one of their ritualistic practices is hooking up an OBD reader to their motorcycles.

BHPian ashwinprakas recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

After picking up a BS6 motorcycle, I myself have been forced to adapt to the ways of the EFI people and one of their ritualistic practices is hooking up an OBD reader to their motorcycles.

Now an OBD Reader needn't need an introduction as it's fairly common these days, but an issue us motorcyclists are familiar with is that we do not have the luxury that car owners get to have by directly plugging a sensor into their ports as most if not all motorcycles come with a variation of smaller connectors that usually need an adapter to be bought or made.

In my case, I found one on Amazon costing a whopping 800/- Bucks!

The OBD reader I'd used was the one from iCar / Vgate, Shashi was the one to recommend it to me and it is my go to brand as I can leave it hooked up to the vehicle without a care in the world due to its voltage sensitive auto-shutdown feature.

Anyways, due to the lockdown I'd not been able to get hold of these things as I'd placed the order to my parents place and since movement was restricted I only got hold of these things a day or so ago when my father drove down to the capital as he had to leave the country (Read: Amazon Return Window Closed).

Being curious I hooked it up to the motorcycle within minutes of getting hold of it, one thing to notice is on motorcycles the OBD 12V supply only comes ON with the Ignition Key ON whereas in Cars it's always powered. The Sensor powered on in my case and that was a huge relief as that confirmed the sensor was working fine and so was the adapter, or at least that's what I'd thought.

But after installing two apps, 'Torq' which costs 250/- bucks on Play Store and another app named 'Piston' which is free, I couldn't tap into the ECU, reading simply failed.

I was at a loss cause the sensor was powering up fine, and when tested with the Alto was working flawlessly, so the issue surely had to be with the adapter that I paid a relative fortune for.

Now, I am an EFI novice and usually I'm prideful of the fact that I'm from the dying breed that still can work on Carburettors and more so set one up from scratch. But that wasn't helping my case and I had to seek help, which was when a friend and fellow enthusiast Ashish simplified the whole concept of OBD for me.

Basically you have the Power Line, Ground Line, CAN High and CAN Low Lines, so to power up the unit you need to get the Power and Ground set right and for the unit to work as intended you need to set the CAN High and CAN Low lines right. Here's an illustration he shared that made life easy for me.

Now since I had the basics figured I just needed to reconfigure the wiring and for that I had to pull out the pins individually from the connector and reconfigure them. Which I did;

The how of it is simple, using a multimeter find what pin is connected to what checking continuity and once you've made a note of it use the multimeter to check voltage of lines, figuring the power lines is common sense, as for the CAN lines, the one with Higher Voltage is the CAN High and the one with the lower Voltage is CAN Low, pretty self-explanatory.

So this is where we're finally at;

Royal Enfield Bullet 350 BS6

• Brown Wire = Positive
• Black Wire = Ground
• Yellow + Red Wire = CAN High
• Purple Wire = CAN Low

These 4 Wires from the harness side is all you'd need to hook-up to the OBD Sensor to get it to work. There is one more wire which is for ABS, which I've not bothered to hookup, period.

NOTE: In the OBD Sensor diagram you will see Pin 4 and 5 shown as Ground, both these pins needs to be connected to the same Ground on the motorcycle side.

Once I'd figured out the wiring I just reinstalled the pins into the connector and did a recheck.

Everything was working fine!

I'd be taping it up when I find the time. Thought I'd share this first before I forget the colour codes.

So I thought I'd put this thread up so others can also share their findings respective to their Motorcycles so that we as motorcyclists wouldn't have to shell a fortune to buy so called adapters and get conned for it when we could simply build ourselves one for peanuts.

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.