hey guys welcome back to the channel so today we're gonna nerd out a little bit and go
back to my electro engineering routes so recently i picked up this manual gauge cluster
for my eventual manual swap the only problem with it is the mileage doesn't match my car
so what i'm gonna show you today is how to spend ten dollars on an amazon programmer
so you get into this baby reprogram the eprom and get the mileage to match your car so stay tuned
so if this is your first time on the channel i want to thank you for clicking on this video and
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subscribe button and click the bell if you want to stay up to date on all my videos i do a lot of
diy videos on my is-250 my is-300 my sienna and anything around the house that's useful
so i got this manual cluster off a guy on one of the facebook group and i've been keeping an eye
on these on ebay and elsewhere they usually go for like 150 to 200 and this guy had it for much
cheaper so i decided to pick it up irregardless of the miles i didn't even bother asking about
the miles because i knew i was going to do this project and reprogram it so on today's video what
we're going to do is we're going to get inside this thing i'm going to show you how to take
it apart without breaking too much or breaking anything up and then once we're inside i'll show
you how to prep the eeprom chip and get the reader on there before we even get started with that
i'll show you that 10 amazon programmer that i bought you have to make some slight modifications
to that programmer before you can actually use it on this gauge cluster or on any car environment
just because of the voltage so i figure if you're geeking enough to attempt this you should be able
to make these modifications without any issues so what we're going to need to program this is
this 10 ch341a chip programmer that you can buy on amazon so this thing programmed all 25 and 24
series eproms they also come with two or three adapters that allows you to program some other
chips but the problem is most of this is geared towards 3.3 volts and motherboard type bios in the
automotive environment you have to actually use five volts to write to these eproms i learned this
from dr shock's youtube channel he has a pretty good tutorial on how to modify this and i'll link
it in the description box see his full explanation on what to summarize it basically what you need to
do is they give us this blank board it's got no pins or anything in it so we have to add pins to
it so we have to actually cut some of the traces and from there once you cut those traces you have
to provide new traces so what i did was i used some wire wrap wire that i used for way back in
my electrical engineering days and i actually soldered these new connections as you can see
on the screen and what that does is that basically converts the 25 series slot on the zip socket to a
93 series chip so we can actually program it and it comes with this little clip so what that does
is that allows you to basically plug the little chip clip into the slot on this board and then
that board goes into the zip socket and then from there now you just plug it into your usb port you
pull up as programmer and you're able to read the chip so that was the first modification you have
to do for the adapt on the second modification you actually have to do it to the actual
ch341 board the first thing you need to do is you need to cut the 3.3 volt trace on the main
power regulator chip so all you have is a 5 volt output so you don't accidentally provide 3.3 volts
for any reason and then on the back side of the socket so you actually kind of cut the 3.3 board
trace that goes to the number 5 pin once you cut that then you have to actually add your own jumper
from the five volt pin to the number five pin so the number five pin is actually connected between
these two 24 and 25 on the board so you don't have to worry about the zip if you ever have
to use it for 24 25 and then one other thing you have to pay attention to on the adapter is that
you have to actually set your eeprom that you're going to be reading and writing to as
either an 8-bit or a 16-bit so for the toyota e-prompt that we're going to deal with these are
16-bit e-prompts so you actually hide the chip select to high which sets it to 16 bit versus
tying it to ground which sets it to 8 bit so now that we got a quick little lesson
in eprom programmers and a little bit electrical engineering we'll go ahead open up the cluster get
started on this so i've got three clusters that i'm going to be messing with i've got my original
cluster i've got that manual cluster then i've got that 2001 cluster that i got from the junkyard
recently that one is a little bit different than the 2002 to 2005 version just because the
pin outs and the wiring a little bit different so that one's actually worth a little bit more
because i think there's fewer of those available and if anybody needs those it's hard to come by
versus the 2002 to 2005. so before we get started we're going to take apart the four phillips screws
there's two others tinier ones that need it needs a precision screwdriver over by the
number a harness and then one up top here for the lens so we'll go ahead and unscrew those now
so let's get that out your cluster probably has a piece of tape over the top here that
i already peeled this off because it was already peeling and you just pull off this
little pcb board harness off of here so just pop this off just wiggle it and pop it off
and then kind of just get it out of the way so this is the b plug
harness that goes into here and after you're done with that you go ahead and just pop the lens off
and pop the front cover off that way you can put this off to the side so you don't damage anything
let's go ahead and take the front cover off this this one so you just
you can pop all these little clips here do it by hand or if you have a little
little screwdriver or a little panel popper you could probably put that in there too
so we got that off now we have basically the bare cluster and what we want to do is on the back side
here you could now pull the center part out of the so now we have the whole housing apart and all you
have is the board so the first thing you do if you actually read the factory manual and i'll post the
instructions on the factional manual up on the screen right now to see so if you want to follow
that but what you did do is actually pop out the speedometer so that's the first thing you want to
pop out it's not held on by anything except for a bunch of little nubs and those nubs are actually
the contacts that make the electrical contact in there so that you have to actually pop those out
of there and their compression fit in here so that makes it a pain in the ass to do the first
time around from the factory manual they tell you to pull out the speedometer so you just grab the
speedometer by the face and just kind of wiggle it around and it says you have to put some force
on it but not too much force so you just want to just wiggle this thing around until it comes out
yep so the whole thing comes out pretty easily there
so yeah just got to work it once you get that out then you can take the two sides off pretty easily
so i've got this little plug right here which i got from that 2001 cluster at the junkyard
and i figured out the pin outs i'll show the pin outs right here on the screen right now for the
2002 to 2005 version plus what the pin out is for the 2001 version also if you need to know that
but what i ended up doing was i identified the grant power and ground to power up the cluster
so we could read it i also figured out the illumination wires between the 2001 and the
2002 versions too so on my next video where i'm doing the led swap on these i can test those
so we just plug that in here i've got my bench tester here go ahead and connect the positive wire
here the negative wire over here make sure nothing's shorting out on these
plug up the power supply this is an old dell power supply i turned into my bench tester
so you see the cluster is reading 239 735 so we'll go check what's on my original cluster
and this baby's got 195 742 right now on the clock and we'll go in the computer and figure
this out with the programs i have so we're inside the computer now and i've got this program i found
online called technosoft mileage calculator this program actually helps you determine what your
mileage is in hex format so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select the car we're working
on which is the lexus is 300 for this so it's got a 93 c46 eprom chip so that's what we have there
so in here they show you the format that the mileage is written so the mileage is written
here in two bytes so you got the ee and zero zero is the example of your mileage and it repeats a
bunch of times between these three lines here in the code so what you want to do is determine what
you need to rewrite so the first thing i'm going to write in here is i'm going to put the original
mileage that we read which was 239 735 and i'm going to calculate what that is so that number
ends up being a one five three seven we're gonna expect to find one five three seven here when we
read that cluster i bought the manual cluster and then we're gonna get the new one that i need to
program into that manual cluster which is 195 742 so we're going to calculate that one so that one's
going to be an f9 2c so we're going to expect to write back into their f9 2c into the eprom get
the mileage it won't be exact from what i read it's going to be close within 20 or 30 miles of
what you're supposed to be which is good enough it's better than you know 30 or 40 000 miles
so we took everything off and we're back inside the board so what you want to look for the ic6
chip is which is right here right by that mount for the lcd so there's an ic6 and you'll notice
that there is like some blue flux on all the chips throughout this whole board so here i've got the
automatic cluster open and ic6 chip is over here which is in a different spot versus the manual
side so you can see flux all over it so you got to clean up all that flex right there so the first
thing you need to do is scrape off all that off the actual chip and off the pin that way when you
clip it on you make good contact and you can write and read to the chip so you can see right here i
zoomed it in with the magnifying glass and i took a photo you can see the chip in there it's a 93
c46 series so that matches what we read in the technosoft software so we'll go ahead and plug up
the programmer and clip this chip so what you want to do is just plug your programmer into the make
sure your adapter's in correctly with the the pin one is in the right orientation so on your clip
you'll see a little red line so that red line means that's pin one so you gotta make sure pin
one and the zip socket is correct matches and then you wanna look on your board you'll see a little
dot on the chip that is pin one on the chip so you want to do is you want to just clip this
thing onto there so it makes a good contact and you know it works because the board has a little
power indicator on there if you clipped it wrong that power is going to short out and it's going to
not read correctly okay so we got it in there so i'm gonna pull up aes programmer now on
the computer so we're in the computer and we're pulling up as programmer 2.1 so like i said i had
gotten this information from dr shock's youtube channel he had gone over this and this is a
program he used so i downloaded the same program he's got all the links to this information on his
website so what you want to do first is you want to go in here you want to select your ic which is
uh here it's going to be a micro wire micro chip and then you want to go to the m 93 c 46 16 bit so
this is a 16 bit chip in this so the first thing we want to do is we want to read the ic so we're
going to hit read ice so it looks like that was a good read on that one so we got 17 37 and then we
get a bunch of 1637s which is what we wrote down earlier the calculation was a 1537. it's a little
bit different than what we're seeing on the actual board when we wrote it because we wrote down 15 37
and this was the decoding is just a little bit off sometimes so that's so i want to go in here
i'm going to go ahead and just write the new value which is f9 2c so we want to repeat that
you want to leave the last two bytes on here ff
so we got that let's verify that we didn't do any typo so everything looks correct so
what i'm going to do now i'm going to write this to the chip so i'm going to program ic
and then i want to set the programming so it executed pretty fast so the next thing i want
to do is i want to verify the chip so this is success so let's just read the chip now
so it looks like we read the same values again so i'm going to go take this apart
get back out plug it up and see what the reading says so i just plugged in the
lcd part for the testing instead of putting everything in and dealing without unplugging
it and plugging it back in so i'm plugging up the power i've already clipped my power
i'll plug this in so now it's reading 195 722 so it looks like our program is a success
we're good with this and we've got it programmed to the actual mileage we need on this car
hey guys thanks for nerding out with me today and learning about programming eproms and
messing with gauge clusters if you guys are interested in doing this check out the description
box below i'll link to all the different resources i use to learn about programming
this along with setting up that programmer from dr shock his videos are very informative along with
speedcar 99 his videos were the ones that kind of inspired me to learn how to do this
i learned a lot just reading his tutorials and watching his videos where he was doing
very similar programming on his cars so anyways if you guys found this video useful just give it
a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to your channel already to stay up to date on all my
different projects and diy stuff on all my cars go ahead and subscribe to your channel turn on the
bell notifications if you want to know when i post videos i usually try to post once or twice a week
on different things i'm doing but anyways thanks for watching and i'll talk to you guys next time
you