Setting up IDS to record when certain conditions occur is another way to let the scan tool work for you. Today, I had an 03 Explorer with the O/D light flasing and P0741 in memory. I cleared the DTC and wanted to take a 2 minute recording (1 min pre/1 min post) when the PCM set a DTC.

First, you select the PIDs you want to view, and in this case, I also needed the DTC status PID because that would be the PID triggering my recording. Once Datalogger is up, highlight the DTCCNT PID (or the PID you want to trigger off of) and go into this screen (hit the button under "#"):

Trigger setup: [IDS Triggering]

When you hit the "Autocapture" button, the options on the right of the screen will be displayed. If you select "Beep", IDS will activate a tone telling you a recording has been triggered. Hitting the "i" buttion will explain the difference between "Transition" & "Condition".

Since I had just cleared the DTCs, P1000 was in memory and the DTCCNT PID was recognizing that; so I had to set my upper limit to 1. If, while driving, the P1000 clears, you need to set the upper limit to 0.

Here's my recording time setup:

[IDS Triggering]

Unfortunately, the P0741 didn't return during the test drive so I had to induce a DTC for this example. This is what I got:

[IDS Triggering]

You can use any PID to trigger a recording and there are tons of different cases where this can be useful. Here's another example where I triggered a recording:

[2006 Ford F-250 Super Duty XL, ECM/Inputs/Outputs Scan Data]

In that case, nobody was around to watch the screen or wiggle the harness and I didn't feel like routing all that IDS cabling to the engine bay. I knew something happened when I heard the "Beep".

Maybe this will help someone.

Robby from Alabama

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