Fully Automatic Factory Service Manual (FSM) Downloading (3 Viewers)

[HiCBird]

Part 2: Introduction and Instructions​

The concept is pretty simple. Toyota provides access to their documentation via a subscription service which provides a searchable interface to access information for specific vehicles. Unfortunately they do not provide a streamlined way to gather the information; users can save many hundreds of individual files and create their own structure, but we wanted a more automated method. Toyota's search system provides some insightful structure to the files, so I parsed out their search categories (and subcategories) and used them as a directory structure without renaming the files. Without getting technical, this allows me to create small zip files which contain the necessary programs and data to download all of the documents. The system is hands off... I set the vehicle(s) and document(s) and everything is automatic. For the end user, all you do is supply your subscription information (via a cookie Toyota issues your browser) and run a file, and all of the potentially hundreds of documents are downloaded and categorized for you. It is as logical and simple as I can generate without any human intervention.

So, without any further delay, here is everything you need to know to get your PDFs.

First and foremost, if you don't have Firefox, you need it. You need it for this system, and it's a nice alternative to Internet Explorer. You can find step-by-step instructions for obtaining and installing Firefox here:
http://opensourcearticles.com/articles/introduction_to_firefox

Once you have Firefox installed here is what you need to do...

First, visit https://techinfo.toyota.com/indexhttps.html and purchase a TIS subscription. You can purchase them for 24 hours, a month, or a year. For most people 24 hours is more than enough, and costs only $10.

After you have purchased your TIS subscription, you need to download and unzip the "packages" you want. I use WinZip, but there are many archiving options out there including the built-in Windows Compressed Folders shell.

I'll assume you are using WinZip since it is simple and straightforward. If you are not, I leave it to you to find out how to unzip the package.
When you open it, click Extract:

Then, pick a location. For example, I like to keep my Lexus Documents in a main folder, then break them down by year, so I chose D:\LexRepair\1996\ This means that when I am all done (with the whole process) my FSM will be in D:\LexRepair\1996\1996 Lexus LX450 Repair Manual\ and so on... once you have your location, hit extract:

Now, open up http://techinfo.toyota.com in FIREFOX!
Once you are logged in, click on Tools -> Options:

Then click on "show cookies":

Then, follow these three steps exactly!
Step 1: type toyota.com where it says search
Step 2: click the cookie it finds. It must find this cookie. If not, post here because you have a problem.
Step 3: click where the big cryptic text is and hit Control+A to select all the text, then Control+C to copy all the text.

Now that you have copied your cookie contents, you need to paste them into the cookies.txt file. Navigate to the Downloader folder (you just unzipped it) in my case note it was in D:\LexRepair\1996\1996 Lexus LX450 Repair Manual\Downloader. Once there, find and open cookies.txt:

Select the text EXACTLY like you see it below. You need to include the all asterisks but NOT the tab before them...:

Now that you have selected the text, hit Control+V to paste the new cookie onto it, then Control+S to save cookies.txt:

You can now close the cookies.txt file and double click "begin_download.bat" to start the process.

Once you are done, your folder should look like it does below with all the PDFs in their respective folders:

If so, congrats, you are done! If not, you need to post back here because I insufficiently explained something and it didn't work ;p

Also of note, if you are downloading a couple of different documents (different zip file packages), you can copy your cookies.txt file from the "\Downloader" folder of a successfully finished package into one of the each new "\Downloader" folder and just double click begin_download to start each new one. Each package requires its own "\Downloader" folder because obviously each document's list of links are different.


Below you will find a list of all the documents that are available to date.

Does this still work? Just checking before I subscribe to tech info. Thanks.