Top miles on a UB3 cluster

[GP1138]

Any suggestions for a 'next step'?

 

[1990lumina]

I'd shoot it myself...remember those pics posted up here a few months ago of a harddrive and laptop shot to hell lol...

 

- Jeff L.

[Dirty Rockstar]

Fuckin a NO.. here has to be SOME way to reprogram the shit.. NOW I am pissed off..

[5speedz34]

You should be able to get it reprogrammed I'm sure. Contact a dealer or GM straight.

 

So was that a Canadian cluster? If so I wonder what a American cluster would do?

[pitzel]

5speedz34, it was a dual metric/miles cluster. Same version for Canada/USA.

 

I guess I could eBay it 'as is'. Probably would have a pissed off customer in that instance. Or I could use it as a 'core' for one of those cluster trade-in repair places, lol. The ones I've contacted though have told me that there is no way of setting them back, so they'd probably be pissed off as well.

 

Anyone? The GM dealer ppl here are so dumb they can't even tell bolts from washers

[GnatGoSplat]

Heh, I'll buy it for cheap if you want to sell it!

Then I can swap some chips and figure out which stores the mileage.

 

I bet it's that one you can see through the access hole.

Maybe you can reverse engineer it?

[Jcrow]

I dont know if this will help, but once when I was younger and we had bicycles, someone had a digital speedometer and it had so many miles, anyway I had the clicker thing out of a click style lighter (high voltage) and I zapped the speedometer and the miles reset to zero. They were mad at me

[GP1138]

I dont know if this will help, but once when I was younger and we had bicycles, someone had a digital speedometer and it had so many miles, anyway I had the clicker thing out of a click style lighter (high voltage) and I zapped the speedometer and the miles reset to zero. They were mad at me

 

That's nutty enough to be worth a try!

[Baddflash]

Sorry to hear that, but atleast you know how to add mileage to a cluster. Now to just figure out which chip stores the odo and flash it. I almost think that there should be a set of pins that just need to be jumpered to reset it, just like the trip odo.

[supreme_style21]

Just install it in your car and sell it as the highest-mileage w-body in existance.

[GnatGoSplat]

Just a little update on this topic...

 

I got 90% of a UB3 cluster from Davis (missing parts, but fine for my purpose).

I desoldered the NDM457 chip from both clusters (the 18-pin chip visible through the hole in the back). Then I soldered an IC socket into both clusters. With the chip completely out of the cluster, the mileage shows up as 999,999km and 621,234mi. I then swapped the chips and the mileage moved with the chip.

 

So NDM457 is definitely the odometer chip, and is apparently self-contained (it isn't "married" to a cluster).

 

Interesting thing about the cluster I got from Davis, it's out of an 89 with HUD and the digital speedometer part doesn't work which I think Brian has mentioned is deliberate. Pretty stupid, IMO. I noticed some missing components on the display board which I populated with parts from my junk bin, but that didn't make it work. I'm not sure if I missed something or if there's something in the programming that makes it work like that. One of these days I might get curious enough to swap the display boards. The nice thing about the HUD cluster is it has a separate little daughter card that I traced back to pin C9 which is not connected to anything on a regular UB3 cluster, but is a LOW FUEL output on this one to drive the LOW FUEL indicator on the HUD.

[5speedz34]

Cool investigation Shawn!

[Dirty Rockstar]

Kick ass.. Now just need to find a way to reprogram the chips..

[Daggar]

What about replacing the chip with a similar chip? There has to be an equlivlant of sorts maybe TI or Motorola? Like maybe all the chip does is store the odo reading. 18 pins one for each in and out of each digit on the display perhaps with the last one being the error or kill pin?

[GnatGoSplat]

I'm thinking it's a custom Nippon Denso odometer chip, probably a microcontroller with built-in EEPROM. I'd have to scope it out to know for sure, unless someone else (pitzel?) figures it out.