[Music] hi i'm hawkin with top don and today we're going to walk through the new top don phoenix smart the top don phoenix smart is a full functional professional level diagnostic scan tool this tool will be a great solution for your shop on a number of different fronts uh does pre-scan and post scans reports that you can give to your customers it works with the battery testers that we offer also works with so if you want to activate the tool and use it for 8 os calibrations you can do that also
does programming via a cloud-based programming service that we offer and a number of other functions so we're going to kind of walk through all of those things on the tool and show you some of the features and also how to change some settings if you do need to in the future on your tool so we're actually going to start in the top right here on the gear and we're going to click on that and we're going to walk through this menu first now in this menu we have a number of different options we're ju
st going to go through them one at a time phoenix mdci is where you can view the communication dongle that you have for your tool if you have more than one dongle you can actually activate more than one dongle to your account and it will show the other ones that you have activated on your account and when i say your account i mean the email address that you use to log into the tool uh activate mdci is if you get a new one or when you first buy the tool and you're setting it up this is where you'
re going to enter in your serial number and activation code on the password letter that comes with the tool fix mdci firmware that is something that you're going to use usually at the request of one of our support professionals i do not recommend doing this unless you are being specifically asked to use this online programming the online programming menu contains cloud-based programming service for a number of different vehicles this is this database that has all of this programming is not all-e
ncompassing so just because a vehicle brand is listed listed here does not necessarily mean that there will be coverage on every single module for every model of vehicle made by that manufacturer so sometimes there will be programming sometimes there will not we do our very best to get the best coverage we can on this but of course there are always holes in every database and of course there will be in this one as well uh for coverage we do have audi volkswagen bmw hyundai kia land rover jaguar
mercedes mg nissan porsche renault seat skoda and subaru now uh land rover and jaguar actually accessed through the same menu which is just labeled land rover but uh same thing would be true for mini cooper as long as it is a mini cooper made by bmw uh then it would be found through that menu that says bmw so just some things to keep in mind on the online programming data stream sample this is where you can find data stream that you have saved on any vehicle that you've recorded it and you can a
ccess those and play those back profile profile is where you set up your profile for logging into the tool so you can change your email you can change your gender you can change your nickname all of that stuff right there change password this is the password that you use to log into the tool that you use for your account if you need to change it this is where you would do that we're not going to do that at this time wi-fi wi-fi is pretty self-explanatory this is where you would go and set up the
wi-fi connection uh for the tool diagnostic software clear if you want to delete some software out of the vehicle for instance uh some of the brands of vehicles that maybe you do not use on a given given area so for instance we're in north america we don't have sayot we don't have shine ray or shang chai or some of these other brands so we could selectively delete these off of the tool if we wanted to do so it's not crucial that you do this but if you want to you certainly can so if we go throu
gh here and we say hey you know what we don't use this we're going to delete that look at that we deleted it from the tool now there's a few other options here we're going to go through so we've also got business information where we can change our business information upload a logo and whatnot customer management right there we can add individual customers now this is something you might find really useful if you're a mobile diagnostician this is where you can enter in names of shops where you
perform services and then you can assign each diagnostic report that you generate with the tool to a given customer so this is something you can use for that function if you wish as a regular service shop i don't think it's real practical to enter in for every single customer you have but you absolutely can if you want to diagnostic record this is where you can see all of the vehicles that you have scanned and it's also a quick link to get back into a vehicle you just worked on so for instance y
ou can see there's a volkswagen up at the very top here if we wanted to connect back to that vehicle we could do that from this menu right here and you can go in here by dates as well and months so it can kind of go through the menu there and see all the different stuff we've had hooked up to again that was diagnostic record photo album is where you can store screenshots so if you've taken screenshots with the tool or physical pictures with the tool because remember the tool does in fact have an
actual camera this is where you will find those pictures stored in the photo album screen recorder this is where you can see all the recordings that you have for the tool so if you have anything that you've recorded on the tool while you're driving it or anything of that nature live recordings of data stream things like that you can see any screen record videos here in this section okay then there's also settings and that is kind of a deeper settings menu than the menu we were just in uh in her
e you can see if you need to update the tools operating system you can check for updates on the about tab up here in the top left you can look at you can turn the sleep time up or down if you want it to never sleep or you want it to sleep sooner or units you can l from metric to imperial most people are going to change to metric when you're doing calibrations a lot of other people would prefer to use imperial units when they're doing other basic tasks language you can change your language time z
one you can change your time zone t code is if you are doing any software activations so whether you're adding a dos calibration capability to the tool or you are updating updating your subscription uh because your subscription has expired t code is where you would enter that clear cache um that would just basically be if your tool is starting to slow down a little bit or anything of that nature you can clear your cache and it will restart the app not necessary to do this generally speaking but
you might get asked by support at some point if you're experiencing any issues usb connection mode this is where you can set it if you want to connect it to your computer to restore or excuse me retrieve pictures from it or videos you would set it to device mode instead of host mode and then you would connect to the computer and it would allow you to retrieve pictures and videos from it just like you would a cell phone restore factory settings this is something you don't want to do unless you're
being asked by support or if you are selling the tool this might be something that you would want to do to reset and wipe out everything in the tool that you have set up and made it your own log out uh basically if you want to log out of the tools so it cannot be used um you would have to have your email and password to log back into the tool but that would hypothetically disable the tool if somebody else were to take it so if you want to do that you certainly can do that so that concludes the
settings menu now we're going to go in and kind of look at the other things on the tool so we're going to go to user info on the bottom right and you can see that takes us to the exact same place that we were already so the gear in the top right or user info on the bottom right take you to the same location so we're going to work backwards here through the order we're going to go to feedback feedback is a very crucial menu it's important that you take note of where this is located if you have an
y problems with your tool it does not perform a function that you think it should uh it says it's doing something but it doesn't complete the action uh maybe there's a live data pid that seems to be missing that you don't find on this tool but you find it on the factory tool or some other tool this is the place you can submit that feedback to us so that we can correct that issue and fix it so when you get into the feedback menu it's going to have a list of a bunch of different vehicles you've wo
rked on now i haven't worked on a ton of vehicles with this particular tool yet so there's not a very long list however if there is anything that i've worked on that there's a feedback log it'll be right here on feedback so let's say it's a gm we worked on we could say okay we click on gm and then we have an option here so it's going to tell us we can choose a feedback log so we can hit choose file in the top right we can choose a feedback log from whatever vehicle we worked on so i've got some
2021 silverado files and an old astro van file so we want to choose whichever log file from whichever vehicle that we had the issue on where it did not function correctly so in this case it was an astrovan so we've attached the correct log file now we're going to decide what kind of an error we ran into so for me it was a special function that didn't work and for me it was abs brake bleed would not run okay so we've entered in what we've got you know put in your phone number or your email here w
e're just going to put in my top done uh email here so and we've entered that and then if you have any pictures that you took like screenshots of the error or anything like that you can add those and then if you have any data stream files that you recorded when this happened you can also add those and then you're going to submit the result and after you do that it sends it off to the engineers and they have an opportunity to try and correct the problem so again feedback is very crucial if you do
run into issues with the tool where it fails to complete an action something is missing from the tool you believe it should have or that you found is present on another tool whether it's a top don or an autel or a bosch or the factory tool if it's missing from the tool or doesn't work like it should let us know we're always interested in the feedback and that's how we make the tool better for you every day so that's the feedback menu now we'll go to the history menu history menu contains a list
of all the vehicles that you've worked on recently and you can go back into those and look at any data that you've stored so on this volkswagen here we have a diagnostic report we saved that we can reopen looks like we've got some screenshots of data here that we took and if we had any other types of data we could certainly go back and look at those as well so you can also look at your diagnostic reports for everything in this menu so that's the history folder library this is going to give you
some various information that you can access so you can get some shortcuts to facebook youtube chrome uh chrome can also be gotten to from the main page at the start of the tool and they'll see in the top right corner there's a little logo for chrome you've got learning materials here which is basic information just talking about special function playbacks coverage list this is useful if you're curious about whether or not a tool is going to be able to do a specific function you can go into this
menu and you can look up the vehicle and you can check to see if it has the capability for that you can also find coverage lists like this on top don's website so keep that in mind and then you also have an obd code library so the obd code library here you can punch in an obd code so like a u1000 for instance and we can ask okay what vehicle brand it's going to ask us so it's just going to look through the database here so we'll just say gm so nothing there on gm let's try ford nothing on ford
we'll try mercedes nothing there so we could pick something else maybe a little more common so let's say a p0300 and we'll say gm so it looks like the full code library is actually not working at this moment so we're going to omit that but you can go in and look up some ob default codes in here it might be because my internet's not connected correctly right now but that is where you can look up the ob default code library so can also go into support this is a spot here where you can remote contr
ol other people's tools or have them remote control yours generally speaking it's going to be they're going to remote control your tool so they can pull up teamviewer on their computer and on teamviewer they can punch in your id and they will be able to remote control your tool this is very useful if you run a diagnostic hotline of some sort or if you happen to have multiple shop locations and you need a technician to help another technician so really helpful to have this and again that's suppor
t update is pretty self-explanatory this is where you can go in and update the software of your tool so right here we can go in and we can check for updates there's no updates available at this moment you want to check updates regularly as they do update our tools uh very often and there are frequently improvements happening to the tool so you want to make sure you're downloading the latest updates battery tester allows you to use the top don bt mobile pro s battery tester with your scan tool an
d you will be able to generate battery testing reports with the tool by clicking on the tester and connecting to the tester so that's pretty nice if you purchase an activation card you can activate capabilities on the phoenix smart and of course you'd be able to do all dynamic calibrations uh just with the scan tool and then if there are static calibrations you can buy the top don phoenix mobile kits and those come with various targets that you can use to do static calibrations on vehicles so th
at is what the is for great capability and obviously gives you a huge expansion of what you can do with the tool if you so choose to expand into the realm services that is a menu that is for quick relearns and resets essentially so if you've got something like an odometer change uh maybe you replace the used module and you need to try and change the odometer on the new one or used one as it were that would be the menu you'd want to check for that there's a number of other options on here if you
don't find the option that you're looking for in here it's important to remember that you might also find that option inside the control module menu when you go in to do a normal diagnostic scan so we'll point that out when we go in and look at that section of the tool but just remember the services menu is one place you can find resets and relearns there is another place which is through the traditional diagnostic menu that you may also find resets and relearns so we're gonna go back here so no
w you have two other options on the left side here you've got auto scan and you've got scan auto scan is going to go ahead and acquire the vin using the dongle and the interface this works on most newer vehicles um if you have an older vehicle sometimes they are not able to acquire the vin via the obd port and in those cases you may have to type in the vin but that's what auto scan is used for regular scan allows you to selectively choose the year make and model or you can also use obd2 mode now
i like to remind folks that obd2 mode is a very good tool for drivability diagnostics so we'll go ahead and we'll scan this vehicle that we're in right now in the obd2 mode so that you can see that functionality so we can watch and see the tool here is just checking protocols to see what kind of communication protocol we have it's going to tell you your readiness status so there's no codes readiness has been completed on seven systems readiness not supported on three systems and all of the othe
r things that you would be interested in so then we get into our normal obd2 menu so basically you have all the same options you would on any other tool it's obd2 compatible or capable uh you can read fault codes you can read freeze frame data if there is any so we'll check and see if there is any there's not see if we have any fault codes there was a fault code for an injector circuit so we'll go ahead and we'll clear that full code we actually had it unplugged which is why we have a fault code
so we're going to read the fault codes again make sure it's gone they're gone okay so now we can also go and look and see what our onboard monitoring test results were everything's okay no issues there we can read live data stream which again i'd like to point out that if you're doing drivability diagnostics obd2 mode is a very valuable tool it's very very fast it streams the data at a faster rate than you're usually going to get out of the oem style data stream so if you are just doing drivabi
lity diagnostics this is an excellent tool for that going into obd2 mode and looking at that data is helpful the other thing you'll find in obd2 mode is typically the diagnostic data pids are standardized into a more universal format so for instance we look at intake manifold pressure it's displayed in psi if we went on a gm it's more likely than not also going to be displayed in psi if we look at barrow we compare again psi so really really helpful as far as diagnostics goes because the obd2 mo
de is again faster which allows you faster graphing and data collection but also more universalized format especially helpful when you're doing things like fuel trim diagnostics if you look at obd2 mode it's in a standardized format whereas some vehicle manufacturers like to use very different terminology for fuel trim stuff that could be confusing uh obd2 mode on the other hand puts it into one standardized format which is more easily uh interpreted for diagnostic purposes so we'll go back here
so that's uh one of the things that i would recommend keeping in mind again if you're going in manual scan mode you can select the vehicle or you can do obd2 mode uh selecting the vehicle again is useful on old vehicles where the auto vin pull might not work or if for any reason it seems like it's not id in the vehicle correctly you can always go in and manually id it as well so we'll go to auto scan now so you can see what that does again auto scan the tool is going to automatically pull the v
in number here and it's going to take us into the menu based on what vehicle it ids it as now for automatic id you also do want to be connected to the internet so do keep that in mind once you get to the main screen after you've scanned it you have a couple options here you have quick access and you have local diagnosis quick access allows you to bypass going in to scan every module if you know exactly which what module you would like to go into and you would like to go straight to a specific mo
dule and do a specific function quick access is what you want if you are going to scan the vehicle do a pre-scan a post scan you've cleared some codes you're confirming a diagnosis whatever like that local diagnosis is what you're going to do so now you're going to see top dones system topology map now you're going to see this on all of the professional series tools the topology map is going to show you kind of a data bus network branch tree so you see the obd port over on the left here the gate
way here and then all the different branches of the network now this is helpful for diagnostic purposes you always want to refer to the oem wiring diagram to verify which modules are on which networks and whatnot but this is helpful to at least see whether or not a module is talking now when we do a scan there's a couple of different options here on the bottom right we've got choose to scan so we can selectively scan a module we've got gateway scan which basically just pings all of the possible
modules that could be in a vehicle it is not verifying whether or not that module is communicating or whether or not that module is equipped it is simply asking the gateway what are all of the modules that you might have system scan is going to basically ping all the modules that are currently communicating and verify that they are in fact communicating they will turn blue so we'll do that system scan again is going to turn all the modules that are currently talking blue however it is not checki
ng to see if there are any fault codes in any of these modules that's a very crucial distinction because if you're not checking for codes and you hit this button and you don't see any red you're going to assume that everything is good right wrong if you see blue modules it simply means that the gateway was able to allow the scan tool to talk to those specific modules now you'll see that there are some modules that are going to show up here in gray gray means that it did not talk to that module t
hat does not mean that the vehicle may not have that module that only means that it cannot talk to that module at this particular point in time so it's important to remind yourself if you're having any other issues with the car or if you scan it for fault codes and you find any communication related fault codes you need to check and verify which modules that vehicle is in fact equipped with because again it may have grayed out modules because of the fact that it's not able to talk to those and i
t may be the case where the vehicle should have that module and should be able to talk to it that's where scanning for fault codes comes in and you need to verify that there are no fault codes for communications in other modules so we're going to go ahead and stop this scan because we've already completed what we need to here now one thing about top on on all of the pro series except for the max in order to go back a menu you simply swipe from either side of the screen so if we go here and we'll
go back into our menu again if we want to go back we're just going to swipe the screen swipe the screen so we're going to go back in here and we're going to do the other style scan so smart scan that's what i do on every vehicle i work on why because again it's checking for fault codes and it's checking for communication so we're going to do the smart scan now we can see we're getting modules in green they're green now instead of blue because the com the scan tool is actually trying to find out
if there are any codes it's not simply just saying hello are you there on the network it is also saying hello are you on the network do you have any fault codes to report now in this case we're going to find that all the modules that come back are green there are no modules in this vehicle currently that are failing to communicate so all of the modules that show up in gray are in fact not modules that the vehicle is equipped with so after we complete this scan we're going to go through and look
at some of the other functions that you'll see on the tool now it's important to remember functions on this tool will vary depending on the vehicle year make model and vehicle manufacturer so important to remember that when you're looking through the functions on the tool and watching this video because what you see on this car might vary from what you're going to see on a ford or a gm or a chrysler but many of the options that you see will be the same or similar in some format so we're going t
o pause the scan because we don't actually need to complete the scan at this point so now we're going to show you what happens up on this top banner so when you're looking at the tool you want to look at this top banner up here above the control unit tree there's a number of different options sometimes you can drag this banner left to right if there's more than a few options again it's going to be dependent on vehicle year make model and also vehicle manufacturer so system list this is going to
give you a more traditional layout of the various modules that are in the vehicle system topology is where we started at full systems list is going to give you a grand master list of all potential modules that this vehicle could be equipped with that's not saying that it is equipped with these just that it could be equipped with these so keep that in mind we can also look at special functions special function is typically something that you're going to have access to on most vehicles this is sim
ilar to the services menu that we went to from the main page but again you're going to see all these special functions listed under here so if you don't see them in the services menu go in get to this tree where you have the diagnostic scan completed and then go to the special function menu on the top now on some european vehicles specifically volkswagen and audi you will also have another menu called guided functions this is something that you have access to as long as you're connected to the i
nternet now which functions the vehicle has uh guided functions mapped out for it's gonna vary very uh it's gonna vary dependent on the model the year and also uh you know just which functions are available on that given vehicle from the factory so you do have to tell the scan tool specifically what engine is in it and potentially transmission depending on what you're doing the tool is going to ask to download a file so again you do need to make sure that you are connected to the internet in ord
er to download this file typically speaking it's a pretty quick download as long as you have halfway decent internet so we'll let it download the file here all right so picking up where we left off here with guided functions guided functions actually allows you to do a number of different vehicle specific things uh relearns things of that nature and be walked through it by the scan tool itself so it's a really really valuable thing to have on volkswagen and audi most manufacturers don't do thing
s like this and it's really helpful to have this specific capability on this particular vehicle so just an example we'll go into engine electronics after we downloaded the guided function support file for the tool now we can go in and select a module and look at the guided functions that are supported so it's going to vary by vehicle manufacturer and year and model uh what functions are supported or provided for but we can see there's a bunch of different ones here generate readiness code is pro
bably the most valuable on volkswagen audi you'll find that you can actually do a readiness check for all of the obd systems uh in the bay you don't actually have to complete a drive cycle you can do it with the scan tool so really saves you a lot of time and i wish every manufacturer would do this but uh something real specific that's super helpful for volkswagen and audi so again this was in the guided functions section um so keep that in mind for future future reference but the tool is going
to walk you through all of these it's going to give you step-by-step instructions and that's always helpful because of course some of these things there's no written instructions anywhere except within the factory scan tool other than on a tool like top done so really helpful to have access to those we can look in a few other modules here just to see what's offered uh transmission if we select that we do have to tell it which transmission is in the vehicle so we can look at looks like there's a
transmission fluid level check there's coding of the control module and then there's basic settings so it'll walk you through each of those then we've got we can look in brake electronics and see what we've got in there you can see there's quite a few other ones here so brake bleeding there's a guided procedure for brake bleeding so if you're going to do a brake fluid flush it's nice to have that because it'll walk you through with what order they want you to do the bleeding in also helps you do
the automated bleed for the abs unit so again really helpful to have access to these guided functions so uh you do also have the special functions menu and some other miscellaneous menus which i'll be honest with you i don't typically ever use um so that's the guided functions really a helpful thing to have access to on volkswagen audi again remember this top banner is going to vary dependent on vehicle manufacturer year and of course the model of the vehicle as well you can see we also have on
line function that's going to give us a menu with a variety of different capabilities so we've got online coding uh parametric configuration we've got uh online programming and also matching and calibration so depending on whether or not you need to perform one of those functions you will also have access to those as well now when you use each of these different functions is going to vary by circumstance but having access to the online coding and the online programming is huge on volkswagen audi
because you don't have to know what the original coding was for the module and of course programming you won't have to have the factory software to program every module now that database is not going to cover you on every single vehicle and every single module but it is a tremendous resource to help you in a lot of situations so at a minimum if you get a vehicle and replace a module you can go in here and try the programming option and if for any reason there is no coverage then you can go down
your normal road of doing programming with the factory software which of course brings to point the communication interface is also a j2534 so you can use the factory software with that communication interface and you will be able to do programming with the factory software so several different options you have on the table there online matching calibration is also something you have access to here so you know again tremendous resources for volkswagen at audi you'll find that on a lot of the eu
ropean vehicles we do have a lot of these online functions available uh and some of the asian as well so keep that in mind this banner up at the top is a really tremendous resource you want to keep your eyes on you do also have shortcuts to the menu from here as well if you have a activated the functionality on your tool now it's also important to remember that you can go into any module by tapping on it like this as long as that module is communicating you will be able to go in and look at all
of the normal things that you would expect to on a given module reading dtcs clearing dtcs module identification specific information if there's any freeze frame data stored you can look at data stream information now on volkswagen audi you can either look at the old school channel based format or you can go in and look at a list like this and the list allows you to selectively choose whatever you might want to look at so if we want to look at ignition timing and throttle valve angle we can go t
here we can pull up those two specific pids together and if we want we can graph them and if we want we can combine them into one graph when you combine them into a graph you can do up to four data streams at a time and you can also pinch like this to change your time base to a little bit wider you do also have uh access and capability to record any of this if you want to now remember we do have access up here if we drag from the top of the screen down we have screen record is this little camera
here we have the clipboard which is taking screenshots we have the camera which allows us to take camera camera pictures with the tool itself and uh then we also have a slider for brightness and a volume slider there too so remember real helpful here if we're looking at a data stream and we want to take a picture we can just do that with the clipboard right there so really nice obviously we can also save samples of data here we can record the data down on the bottom right or you can do a screen
record if you would prefer that that's typically what i do as a screen record or i take screenshots like we just did there so all of those are at your disposal and again you know which data pids you have available is going to vary by module as well as by vehicle model year and function menu both of those will make those much easier for you but again anytime you're working on vehicles just remember you can always interact with the modules by tapping on them just like we just did there to go in a
nd look at things clear codes control things look at live data etc all of those are at your fingertips so that's a basic overview of all of the different stuff the tool can do now you'll notice we can either hit that back arrow in the top left or we can swipe from the side of the screen on either side to go back and it will take us back to the main screen if we swipe enough times but we're back on the main screen the only other thing we mentioned was again chrome is accessible in the top right c
orner but outside of that that's the walkthrough for the tool so if you do run across questions about the tool uh you're not sure about something you saw when you were watching this video or maybe you're working on a specific car and you've got a question about something feel free to shoot us uh you know a question give us a shout on our support hotline and we'll be happy to help you in any way that we can i'm hawking and thanks for watching
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