CLIP – part one

We received a CLIP clone today. CLIP is the tool that your Renault mechanic will use to diagnose any of the brand’s cars. The tool was very kindly financed by “kick-starter” style funding on the Dutch and UK forum. Thank you all for that! Reason I asked for it was that we really like to get to the data of the BCB (the charger inside the car) and we haven’t been able to figure out why. This post is a short update.

Let me first say, the hardware is a serious piece of kit. You have seen your dongles and my interface s and that´s child play compared to this. Two rather massive 4 layer PCB’s plus a connector PCB. Admitted, it seems the hardware can do ISO 9141-2 next to CAN, but the ZOE doesn’t use that. Anyway, it explains the price-point somewhat.

The good news is that it works. Somewhat. As ar as we understand Renault is pushing more and more functions to their central services and there is very little we can do with the tool without online connectivity, which we obviously do not have. Or maybe we do not understand it yet, which is a possibility.


Still, it’s able to run a diagnostic script on all computers of the ZOE and extract their DTCs, including a more extensive context. In theory, that should be enough to teach us how to get at least some data from the BCB. Stay tuned for updates.

9 Comments on “CLIP – part one

  1. Which version of CLIP software did you use for that? (asking because I have an old version, didn’t even try it on the Zoe, but i might actually work then 🙂

  2. I have can clip tool sw 164 and I cannot do anything useful with it without renault net on my zoe Did you managed to find some workaround for this problem ? is V165 any better ?
    Thank you

    • I don’t think so. There is somebody who cracked it, but he doesn’t want to tell, too bad. The only thing that can be done without connection is make a diagnostic report.

  3. is i907 from icarsoft any better, is it possible to delete some faults or configure something with it on zoe ?

    • I got the CLIP tool and it seems we can query the BCB somewhat. Problem is that an “illegal” CLIP tool is VERY limited without it being able to “phone home”.

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