Guys,

A friend and I have exactly the same problem with our LCD Commanders where there is no backlight.

We have since bought ourselves the OLED Commander and when you turn the ignition on these come up with 'Communication Error' and don't boot up.

Have you any thoughts on this please ? Anyone have these issues ?

Thanks,
Gareth

 

My current PFC is about 5 years old, but my commander was from my first PFC in 1999.
I upgraded the PFC just to get a newer version. My Commander was working fine when I replaced it with a OLED last year. It still worked fine and I sold it.

How to keep all working perfectly for a long time:
(1) Keep the Commander out of direct sunlight, and do not let the car interior get hot.
(2) Do not plug in the Commander to the PFC when it is on. Turn off the PFC first.
(3) Disconnect the battery when removing or installing the PFC.

 

Thanks for the above, we had looked after our ecus and done the above but it appears the commander sockets have broken.

Any fixes for these ?
Heating the solder underneath to get the old socket out and then checking all ok and refitting ?

 

The female socket in the PFC , or the male Commander connector that goes into the PFC?
Look for either a 5 or 6 pin mini DIN or 5 or 6 pin PS2 sockets at local electronics stores or on the WWW.

 

I was the other guy who was having the same issue as the OP, we eventually found the issue. Just to keep the solution documented somewhere, we found when using a multimeter the green wire which goes to the hand held commander was not getting any current. We tested this by plugging everything in as normal and taking the back off the commander and turning on the ignition. If your not getting any current to the green wire check the socket in the ECU for dry joints, and check the surface mounted resistor which is next to the socket as that turned out to be fault with ours. The resistor has got 100 written on it and has a resistance of 10 ohms. Just do a continuity check on that resistor, it should have a small amount of solder each end which you can touch your probes on. We found ours were dead and as soon as we unsoldered one side the resistor broke in half! We are sure the issue was caused by a datalogit which had a frayed wire which caused the green wire to get shorted.

One thing to note, on using an old style commander when this issue is present the backlight would not work until the resistor was replaced.