Luxury Package Instrument Cluster Swap - Success, Failure, Success!

mytakamine

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Jun 7, 2020
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The helpful information is at the bottom of this obnoxiously long post!

I have always found the instrumentation in my 2006 Sequoia to be quite dismal. It's never bothered me in the daytime but the green glow of the cluster and backlighting of the center controls makes the whole night driving experience somewhat depressing. I guess this started because the previous owner of my sequoia had installed a very nice Sony ApplePlay head unit that has very nice white backlighting. It looked out of place surrounded by the sea of green. The white ambient glow of that Sony head unit was screaming "We can do better than this!" After some searching of the interweb I discovered the backlighting mod for the center controls and promptly ordered some LED lights on Amazon. I felt a great sense of satisfaction after switching out all of the dull green backlighting for fresh white LEDs. But then the instrument cluster seemed even more out of place. I had also discovered that people were taking apart the cluster and sanding off the green. I thought about doing this but what I really wanted was the optitron gauges from the Luxury Package Sequoia. I didn't buy a luxury package sequoia because captains chairs in the second row of this vehicle is a terrible idea. I have 3 kids and when you remove the 3rd row for camping gear you are left with a 4 passenger vehicle (with a lot of cargo space) that gets 14 mpg. Madness! Anyway, the idea of the optitron gauges made me happy so I started digging. The only information I found was someone who had tried to swap the optitron into a 1st gen tundra but he only had limited success due to the fact that oil pressure gauge no longer worked.

I decided to take the risk and ordered a Luxury Package cluster from a junk yard off car-part.com. I was relieved to discover that the cluster was completely plug and play but challenge would be to get the mileage to read accurately. My Sequoia has lower than average mileage (it was at about 146k at the time). Of the few clusters I found for sale they either had mileage over 200k or miles were not listed. The cluster I ended up with read 191K and I was not content to add that much mileage to my Sequoia potentially lowering resale value. After doing some more digging online I decided I would attempt to swap out the integrated circuit on the clusters that holds the mileage. The Chip is 93C66 and is not hard to locate on either board. I should have spent a little more time gathering the getting the proper tools for the job but I was anxious to test my skills. I grabbed a heat gun and a pair on tweezers and went to town on the circuit board. After gently pulling up on the eeprom with the tweezers and applying the heat for a few seconds it popped right off. Now the hard part - attaching it to the new board. Trying to keep my hands steady I put the eeprom into position with the tweezers and applied heat to the situation. It soldered itself into position within a few seconds and I headed out to the driveway to see if my electrical skills had been a success. The odometer showed a few digits blinking and seemed very unhappy with me. I figured the eeprom must not have seated all the way and went back in to the house to try again. After a 2nd attempt a different set of numbers blinked at me once I plugged the cluster in. Several trips back and forth into the house and spending about an hour trying to clean the blue gunk off the tiny pins I finally had success! The mileage read correctly! But now I had new problems. I must have fried something on the back of the board because the cluster which should illuminate as soon as the key is turned on would only illuminate when the headlights were turned on. Try as I might I could not find the problem. No big deal! I'll just drive with the lights on all the time. Well a few days later I took my Sequoia in for an oil change. When I came back to pick it up they told me that my mileage was reading 423. Like four hundred twenty-three miles on the 14 year old car! This was bad. I'm not sure why this happened. I'm guessing maybe the maintenance minder did not know how to deal with the changed eeprom but maybe they just bumped something when they reset it and it affected the solider connection on the eeprom. I'm leaning toward the former. A few months later I found a local wrecked 4x4 Luxury package Sequoia with 156k on the clock. I dropped another hundred bucks and now I am the proud owner of a 2006 sequoia with the best looking instrumentation around! If anyone can glean any useful information from my useless tinkering it will all be worth it.

Useful INFO
If you are going to do a swap of clusters make sure you get a cluster from a LIMITED sequoia 2005-2007 with air suspension. Luxury package was available in the SR5s but they do NOT have optitron gauges. Luxury package Trucks always have captains chairs in 2nd row, and air suspension.

I doubt this swap would work on any sequoia earlier that 2005 because that is when they updated the instrument clusters.
Obviously 4x4 or 2x4 must match if you are doing the swap.

If you decide to switch EEPROM 93C66 make sure you shield the other circuits and use a narrow tip on the heat gun (I did not do that)
Also there is blue film called Solder Mask around the EEPROM. Try to pull that away before removing the EEPROM. Otherwise it will melt to the pins and make it difficult to make connection. If the odometer blinks after you swap in the EEPROM it means you have not made good connection on the pins.
BE AWARE THAT RESETTING THE MAINTENANCE MINDER MAY CAUSE THE ODOMETER TO RESET ENTIRELY!
 

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