Caretaker wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:33 am
... apparently it isn't very difficult to manipulate current digital displays. Yikes.
I've done it a couple of times in Vibes.
The first time was when I put an 04 red and white cluster in my 03, to replace the 03's all red cluster. That time, I used a square wave signal generator to simulate the speed sensor, and (after temp disabling the speedo) ran the thing at about a thousand miles an hour for a couple of days to bring the new cluster up to match the old one, so that the odo would be accurate for the car.
Before I traded that one in on a different 03, I used info in a
thread here to bring the original 03 cluster up to the current correct value, and put that back in.
I then used that info to set the 04 red/white one to match the new (to me) 03, and swapped it in. Before trading in the second one, I set the original red cluster to be accurate for the car and swapped it back in.
So the cars had accurate odometers when I passed them on, but I suspect both ended up in a junkyard when I was done with them. I know that the transfer section on the back of a Maryland vehicle title has a checkbox to indicate if the odo isn't accurate, but I honestly never needed to check that.
Now I have an 04 base US cluster stuck in a closet somewhere. If I rehomed it, I could also get rid of the old laptop that I keep around just for that because it has a 25 pin parallel port (remember those?) I think its still running windows 95, but it might be running XP. I'm afraid to hook that thing up to the internet.
Seeing the digital odometer pass 100K miles isn't nearly as satisfying as watching the old mechanical odometers roll over back to zero at 100K.
I can't imagine what logic Toyota employed to decide that the odometers should stop at a reading of 299,999.
There was a guy here who said he could set the odometers to actually read 300K+, but never posted any pictures of one, and never said how he did it. I never could figure out how to do that, but the most I ever got out of single Vibe was 288K, so didn't put much time into it