Odo backlight

[Moe47]

Hi guys,

My '00 LS400's odo baclight burned out recently. I have heard a lot of people having problems with climate control display and fixing it, but couln't find anything on the odo/mileage counter display. I can see it's working fine, just the backlight won't turn on. Could really use your help here!

[1990LS400]

I don't think I've heard of one of these failing but it is probably a failed diode and it's probably soldered into a circuit board.

I've been referring people to http://www.taninautoelectronix.com/ which also repairs sticking speedo and tach needles.

[Moe47]

15 hours ago, 1990LS400 said:

I don't think I've heard of one of these failing but it is probably a failed diode and it's probably soldered into a circuit board.

I've been referring people to http://www.taninautoelectronix.com/ which also repairs sticking speedo and tach needles.

Thanks a lot, will check them out right away. Yeah I searched for hours to see if someone has experienced the same problem earlief but no cigar. 

[Moe47]

I had the instrument cluster opened up to get an idea of what might be wrong and found this.

Took the board to a nearby TV repair shop, the repair guy soldered another capacitor(?) in its place.

This fixed the backlight but there was intermittent fluctuation in the light's brightness. Drove the car back home and parked it. The next time I started the engine, the backlight slowly died again. Here's a picture of the brief joyous moment when it worked.

Probably soldered a faulty/wrong cap? 

[Exhaustgases]

I was going to ask how did he know what to replace the burnt one with ?

[Moe47]

I'm absolutely clueless. Probably said a hail mary and picked a random cap from a boxful. Tried searching if a picture of this board was posted on the forums while I was at the repair shop so I could see what was on there, but couldn't find one. 

[Moe47]

Quick update. Fortunately, a friend of mine had a used cluster lying around. Replaced the circuit board with his and it lit up like Christmas! Feels so good to have a working multi information display. Now just need to fix the taillamp failure problem. Going to replace the lights on the third brake light this weekend, see if that fixes it. 

[sha4000]

Glad that you got it worked out.

[Moe47]

Yep, thanks. Changed the bulbs on the third brake light, the annoying taillamp failure error's gone as well. The wattage must have been off on them. 

[M.Yasir]

On 5/27/2016 at 0:44 PM, Moe47 said:

Yep, thanks. Changed the bulbs on the third brake light, the annoying taillamp failure error's gone as well. The wattage must have been off on them. 

I also replaced the bulbs but unfortunately the error message is still there; probably the wattage problem.....

Well coming to the blue color capacitor? might be the capacity.. the tv guy soldered a low capacity one?

[Moe47]

Hmm, make sure you go to a reputed auto parts store to fetch those bulbs. I see many stores here try and push the reaaaally cheap stuff unless you ask for specific things. Don't know much about PF capacitors but the electrician told me that couldn't have been the issue. Plus, I had the capacitor shifted from the spare board to mine and it still didn't light up. Now I can't be sure if it was due to a bad soldering job or something wrong with my board. Then we soldered the caps back to their respective boards, fit the spare one into my car and it worked.