So, being the cheap poop head that I am, I looked at the various services offered for immo deletes, and people want a hundred bucks or more to remove the immo. There's a dingus you plug into the OBD port you can buy on aliexpress that'll do it, but that's $20 or something for a single-purpose dongle. No thanks.
Reading up on ecuconnections the third option is a serial-eeprom reader, for 12 dollars on ebay. Now that's a cost I can stomach!
A certain friend on here was nice enough to provide an already dead victim for me to learn on. They can identify themselves if they want, heh
Good thing, too...
A 400W soldering gun is not suitable for SMD work.
I did however get pretty good at working these chips loose with a 25W iron I bought a few days later.
Well, gotta find a new 24Cxx chip since I killed the 24C04 that was on there.
Luckily I tend to save salvageable boards, this one from an old LCD monitor had a 24c16 directly below the socketed chip.
soldered on there, ignore the bridging, solder wick cleans that right up.
So, we've learned that it is very easy to destroy things. Best try and learn on something a little more disposable. Found yet another 24C16 on a board from a dell 1700 laser printer
Soldered some jumper wires to it in order to use the ZIF socket, easy enough, as pin 7 is unconnected, 1-4 are bridged and the other three are straight over. Manageable. Got it to read and it had some mentions of lexmark 1700 in the information, neat.
Now I need the info off the ECU to flash to the new salvaged chip I'd soldered on. Lucky me, I've got one fresh new $50 junkyard ECU that I'd rather not screw up. Soldered on the jumper leads and read the data, tried making sense of it, tried plugging it into software provided, nothing. Try rereading it and it reads different info every time. Try the dell printer chip again, it reads right again. So maybe there's something else in the ECU trying to power on and the little programmer can't supply enough current... So, nervously desolder the good chip from the good ecu, and solder it onto the reader board's backside
Hey, now it reads the same giberish every time!
Save the binary on the desktop and go put it into "edc15 calculator" and it recognizes it, neato bandito
write the immo-off'd file to the chip, desolder it, solder it to the ECU and put the good one away to be tested later on as it is very cold out. Doing tires tomorrow, I'll test them both then when it is in the shop.
So, back to the dead ECU, desolder the chip salvaged from the old LCD monitor, read it:
Little less interesting than the dell printer one, but w/e. neat that in both cases they don't use all the extended capacity of the 24C16 chip, everything beyond is just FF'd out, gives some hope that tossing the contents of a 24C04 onto it will work out okay.
the board on the bad ECU cleaned up real nice, I wrote the same binary to the salvaged chip, desoldered it from the reader, soldered it to the dead ECU, tossed the dead ECU in the sink, washed it for a while, threw some alcohol on it to dry it out, tossed it in the oven to try and fix it (cue rossmann repair "I rehot board it still not work" sound bite)
Well, that's it, I'll update tomorrow if it worked or not. Low hopes for the one given to me pre-killed. Moderate hopes that the junkyard one will work, as at least that one would do the "catch then die" immobilizer halted stop, whereas I didn't even try plugging in the 'dead' one.
Reading up on ecuconnections the third option is a serial-eeprom reader, for 12 dollars on ebay. Now that's a cost I can stomach!


A certain friend on here was nice enough to provide an already dead victim for me to learn on. They can identify themselves if they want, heh
Good thing, too...

A 400W soldering gun is not suitable for SMD work.
I did however get pretty good at working these chips loose with a 25W iron I bought a few days later.
Well, gotta find a new 24Cxx chip since I killed the 24C04 that was on there.
Luckily I tend to save salvageable boards, this one from an old LCD monitor had a 24c16 directly below the socketed chip.

soldered on there, ignore the bridging, solder wick cleans that right up.

So, we've learned that it is very easy to destroy things. Best try and learn on something a little more disposable. Found yet another 24C16 on a board from a dell 1700 laser printer

Soldered some jumper wires to it in order to use the ZIF socket, easy enough, as pin 7 is unconnected, 1-4 are bridged and the other three are straight over. Manageable. Got it to read and it had some mentions of lexmark 1700 in the information, neat.
Now I need the info off the ECU to flash to the new salvaged chip I'd soldered on. Lucky me, I've got one fresh new $50 junkyard ECU that I'd rather not screw up. Soldered on the jumper leads and read the data, tried making sense of it, tried plugging it into software provided, nothing. Try rereading it and it reads different info every time. Try the dell printer chip again, it reads right again. So maybe there's something else in the ECU trying to power on and the little programmer can't supply enough current... So, nervously desolder the good chip from the good ecu, and solder it onto the reader board's backside

Hey, now it reads the same giberish every time!
Save the binary on the desktop and go put it into "edc15 calculator" and it recognizes it, neato bandito
write the immo-off'd file to the chip, desolder it, solder it to the ECU and put the good one away to be tested later on as it is very cold out. Doing tires tomorrow, I'll test them both then when it is in the shop.
So, back to the dead ECU, desolder the chip salvaged from the old LCD monitor, read it:

Little less interesting than the dell printer one, but w/e. neat that in both cases they don't use all the extended capacity of the 24C16 chip, everything beyond is just FF'd out, gives some hope that tossing the contents of a 24C04 onto it will work out okay.

the board on the bad ECU cleaned up real nice, I wrote the same binary to the salvaged chip, desoldered it from the reader, soldered it to the dead ECU, tossed the dead ECU in the sink, washed it for a while, threw some alcohol on it to dry it out, tossed it in the oven to try and fix it (cue rossmann repair "I rehot board it still not work" sound bite)
Well, that's it, I'll update tomorrow if it worked or not. Low hopes for the one given to me pre-killed. Moderate hopes that the junkyard one will work, as at least that one would do the "catch then die" immobilizer halted stop, whereas I didn't even try plugging in the 'dead' one.
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