I'll be getting a MiniVCI interface, and before I go buy an old laptop with WinXP, does anyone know about using the Mini VCI interface as described in the thread topic?
What did you end up doing? I am looking at these as well and noticed the outdated operating system issue. I found 2016 Cheapest MINI VCI for TOYOTA Single Cable Supports Toyota TIS OEM Diagnostic Software, which claims to work for Windows 10, directly from China, but I haven't ordered it yet.
If you get a Mini VCI, what you have is a "J2534" dongle, and that's an SAE standard that defines the interface between the dongle and the diagnostic software you're using to talk to it. J2534 defines the whole API in terms of functions in a Windows DLL that the diagnostic software will load. (Yes! Microsoft succeeded in getting the Society of Automotive Engineers to publish a standard that effectively mandates Windows as the OS for all automakers' diagnostic software. I'm guessing there were some corks popped in Redmond that night.) That complicates using the Mini VCI with any other OS ... you'd basically have to reverse-engineer the Windows DLL driver that's supplied with it, which is the only layer that's defined and documented, and figure out the actual internal protocol it conducts over USB with the dongle. (Who knows, if you're lucky, it could turn out to be serial-to-an-ELM-chip, with a some few extensions for J2534 operations that aren't offered by ELMs. Somebody would have to do the work to find out.) -Chap
The link is the only one I've come across that claims to work with Windows 10 versus earlier versions of Windows.
