Guage clusters and M30580 Chips - for E46s

[M3_Power 636]

Okay, first off ... HIGHLY ILLEGAL to be tampering with your guage clusters and km. So this is NOT a guide on how to do that. This is more an information post for those that do engine swaps and want to swap in the donor cluster but have no way of changing the VIN number on it or match the actual odometer reading to their LCM and EWS (which I know can be frustrating).

Everyone knows with PA Soft you can change the odometer readings and VIN on certain clusters (mostly pre 2000), but NOT ones equipped with the M30580 chipset. I became a little obsessed with this for pure entertainment purposes, so I starting doing a bit of reading.

There's basically bugger all information out there and most of the posts you come across says the only way to reuse an used cluster is to solder off the M30580 chipset and put a virgin one on and recode the cluster with the factory tool. This however required removal of the cluster face, needles ect.

Well it turns out you don't and there are tools out there that are capable of erasing the odometer readings so you can recode the VIN number on a M30580 chipped cluster - once the odometer is set back to 0km you can re-write the vin and then copy the vehicle order across from your LCM.

Here's the proof on an used E46 M3 cluster I had sitting around that I decided to test this on. The original had nearly 200k km on the odometer and when you used the write FGSTNR function with PA Soft it was blanked out. Once this was wiped back to 0km it became possible.

Special note - this does not work on every single cluster as they have different brands of mainboards. On this particular one I had it worked.

Edited December 15, 2014 by M3_Power

[euroriffic 607]

Wish I was smart. Good work!