The MUT Reader plugs into your car's factory diagnostic port, reads the whole car — engine, ABS, transmission, body — logs it, and serves a live gauge cluster to your phone. That's the whole tool, standalone. Running the MANA digital dash too? Slide it in and it becomes the cluster's data source.
Every 3S and DSM has a MUT port. It is the factory diagnostic connector the dealer's tool plugged into — and on these cars it carries far more than engine data. The MUT Reader is a small ESP32-based board that speaks that protocol, reads it continuously, and turns it into something you can actually watch and record. You do not need a MANA dash — or even a MANA ECU — to use it. It works on any 3S or DSM on its own.
Renders of the current design — hardware is in bring-up; these are CAD, not photos of a finished unit.
| On its own (all you need) | The reader hosts its own Wi-Fi access point and serves a live gauge cluster at a fixed address — join it from any phone, open the page, watch RPM, timing, boost, temps, injector duty and more, and log it. No app, no dash, no other MANA hardware required. This alone is a proper scan tool for the car. |
| In the dash (optional) | If you also run the MANA digital dash, slide the reader into the back of it and it hands the same live stream to the cluster over a direct link. The dash draws the gauges; the reader feeds the numbers. Everything the phone dashboard shows, on your cluster instead. |
The dock is deliberately mechanical and solderless — a reader you can pull out and swap in seconds, with nothing on the connection that can vibrate loose or corrode a solder joint.
| Slide-in rails | The reader's case rides a pair of rails into a matching socket on the back of the dash. The rails align the two halves and a detent clicks it home — the same idea as seating a cartridge. |
| Gold contact pads | Five exposed gold-plated pads on the board meet spring pins in the dash. No plug, no cable, no soldering to make the link — seating the reader makes every connection at once. |
| The dash powers it | One of those contacts is +5 V. Docked, the reader runs off the dash — no separate power hookup once it is home. |
| It knows it's docked | A dedicated detect line tells the reader the moment it is seated, so it switches itself from Wi-Fi-dashboard mode to feeding the cluster automatically. Pull it out and it goes back to hosting its own dashboard. |
| The link itself | A plain serial (UART) stream carries the live parameters from the reader to the dash — simple, fast, and documented, so the dash always knows what every value means. |
| The engine line | The main MUT data stream — RPM, coolant and intake temps, throttle position, MAP/boost, ignition timing, injector pulse width, O2 and closed-loop state, battery voltage, and the rest of the live engine picture |
| The whole car | These cars put each module on its own diagnostic line. The reader is wired to reach all of them — ABS, transmission (A/T), suspension (ECS), climate, body electrical (ETACS) — and read their data and stored codes, not just the engine's |
| It logs | Start a capture and it writes every frame to a timestamped CSV — hand the file to your tuner or your forum thread. The intermittent gremlin that never happens at the shop is now a dated record. |
The reader hardware and firmware are open for the 3S and DSM community — build your own from the files, supply your own ESP32 module, or buy one assembled. It plugs a real gap: a modern, logging MUT scanner for a 30-year-old port, that also happens to be the cleanest way to feed a MANA dash.