Hello Scotty,
I have really enjoyed watching your content on youtube. I thought you may know something on odometers. I have a 1998 Honda Accord LX 4 door sedan 2.3L 4 cylinder VTEC automatic transmission, with last known mileage at approximately past 183,000 miles. So ever since I have owned the car for five years since high school in 2015, the lcd display that displays the odometer mileage info never displays itself right. It would be usually missing some digits to fully read the mileage and I would constantly have to bang on the dashboard to try to get a readout on my mileage or sometimes when I am driving on the road the mileage will randomly display all digits properly before it goes back to showing an unreadable mileage count. This has really annoyed and bothered me for quite a long time. Last november I had a friend try and failed to help me fix the odometer readout issue when we watched a youtube video on how to fix this by adding more solder material to the pins that connect the odometer lcd to the circuit board. Instead doing that made it worse than before, and since then I can't even read the mileage data at all no matter how many times I bang on the dashboard. All I get is incomplete digits that cannot display the mileage, like half 1's and 0's. Now I have no idea how many miles my car has. I have tried to take my car to mechanics in my area to see if they can fix it, so far I have been told it's not worth fixing for the car's age and worth or just pull another one from a junkyard. I've done some research and it appears that the data is stored on a chip, and I thought maybe there is a way to desolder and transfer the data chip that has my correct mileage data and transplant it to another instrument cluster for my car. Or can I obtain mileage data from OBD reader? I know it's not legal to keep my car with an unreadable odometer. This is driving me nuts. Any comments or suggestions? Thanks.
Hey Dan good on you to be so inquisitive and persistent. It sounds to me like the actual display part of your cluster is just wearing out with time. You are on the right track about the chip, its called an eprom chip that usually stands out when you take apart the cluster as you have. Transferring that chip over to a junkyard cluster will transfer the mileage. I have driven cars with nonworking odometers before and have never gotten any trouble the smog check guys or anyone else, its expected as cars near 20+ years. What state do you live in? I think the only trouble you could get in is if you tried to sell the car and were dishonest about the mileage that it has.
Here is a vid of a guy interfacing the eprom chip with a computer to reprogram it.Hope it helps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wygJwWnFm4
Thank you for your response. It is very helpful to me. I will have to check out some junkyards for a working cluster to transfer the odometer info to.
Boy the software stuff looks complex since I am not a computer programmer.
The speedkar99 guy in the video is not a computer programmer either, he is just a very curious person. I learned alot from him and scotty + a few others. You can do anything you put your mind to, it's just a matter of having the right attitude 😎
@ItAintRight, I live in california sorry I forgot to answer that part of your question. Not sure if the California DMV cares on mileage accuray.
Update 06/05/2021, a couple months ago I went to my local junkyard and pulled out and bought 3 used instrument gauge clusters from junkyard 6th gen Honda Accords for $28 each and a bezel. I tested all of them and the displays work though they all show higher mileage than my car from the donor cars, I unplugged the instrument gauge from my car and plugged in the other 3 to test them, some of the donor ones have the maintenance light come on for some reason and some have burnt out light bulbs. I'm trying to find a specialist anywhere who is willing to work on this, I am not really computer hardware literate and don't know how to solder yet. I found someone online who might work on it, I'll have to email him again when I can afford it.
Some higher level scan tools can read the exact mileage on your car, so do not go thorough troubles of recovering the reading from your cluster.
And what higher level scan tools would those be? sounds like they would cost a lot of money to buy one of those.
Autel MaxiSys is one I know of.