Brake, Red Triangle, Check Engine, Yellow !, ABS, Traction Control

Yeah, that's a thing that happens to gen 2 instrument clusters, and can be fixed by replacing a small capacitor on the circuit board. It gets worse over time and eventually can interfere with turning the car on and off.

The Toyota dealer, of course, isn't going to do board-level replacement of a 40¢ capacitor. They'll only put in a whole spanking-new instrument cluster. And they probably will have to wait on diagnosing and solving the new problem(s) until that preexisting one has been fixed, one of those ways or the other.

 

Sure would be funny if the political pendulum swung way further the other direction and we passed a law that required Stealerships to make lower cost basic repairs or refer to a nearby mechanic who will make lower cost repairs when a vehicle is no longer under warranty or in for a recall. That'd be the kind of justice & accountability that I'd require if I had more political power...

The corruption is out of control... Most Toyota stealerships will force the customer to buy a brand new hybrid battery cooling fan if its dirty, even though it takes less than a 1/2 hour to clean. This type of waste and corruption is shameful!!!

 

At the rate they pay for their techs' hours and shop overhead, it's an expensive half hour to clean that fan. Plus they don't want to see you again saying it wasn't cleaned right.

They know what a fan will cost and how long to allow for putting it in; they've got a book for that.

 

It's not corruption, but time and money. If that repair wasn't documented and published - how much would it cost to run down and repair at $150/hr? Labor is expensive and parts are cheap - relativity speaking.
Your assuming those people are skilled enough to do component level repair. I've worked at both OEM and 3nd party repair facilities. The OEM has unprecedented access to OEM parts and ONLY troubleshoot down to the board or assembly level. They swap out the same. How many of them know how to use a Huntron circuit tracker or an oscilloscope? I'm the last component repair technician at my facility. When I started there, more than 30 years ago, there was only 3 out of 15 of us skilled enough to do that kind or work. Management hired a couple of talkers to replace the other two that retired and wonders why repair cost keeps escalating - except in the departments I manage.
This is a moot point for the last decade, since OEMs refuses to release electronic schematics - claiming propriety knowledge. Shout out to 'Right to Repair'. This doesn't stop me from making power supply repairs, which is about 80% of the failures. I've seen so many over the decades, they're easy to figure out.

YMMV....

 

Yeah... I charge $22 for a half hour of labor to clean the stupid fan... And you're telling me that charging more than $300 dollars for a brand new fan, plus 1 billable hour according to the book to replace a fan that takes barely 10 minutes is sensible? Have you lost your mind?

If we had legitimate consumer protection laws customers would at the very least get to choose between paying $22 versus paying More than $400 for the same job.

Seriously, what happened to how auto repair used to work when I worked at a shop in High School in the 1980's? It's as if the stealership mechanics are incapable of cleaning and repairing parts anymore, not because it's not possible but because they're too lazy and greedy to do otherwise.

 

My point is a healthy society puts limits on the destructive forces of greed and unregulated capitalism... There's all kinds of indigenous peoples around the world that have had these limits in their culture and are able to live in general abundance on the same landscape/ecosystem for tens thousand years or more without destroying that abundance...

Then in comes western Europe who destroys entire living systems with all its might as quickly as possible to get every last penny out of the land, which turns it into a wasteland. Then the Europeans move on to someone else healthy land and steals everything of value again. And now here we are in the last decades of this and soon the entire planet will be a wasteland, all because we always over-ride limits placed on greed and corruption so a small number of people get as rich as possible at everyone else's expense. It's total insanity!

 

So your for more regulations and enforcement. At the same time, no one is forcing them to pay for those repairs, though it's going to quickly exceed the blue book value of that car. IMHO

 

Got any hints on identifying U1 in this beauty? I was honestly unable to get any better photo of the numbers. If I could identify it well enough to find a datasheet it'd probably answer a lot of my questions.



Nothing from a Prius. This is in a transformerless SMPS with grounded 120 VAC input and 5 VDC output where (to the best my crossed eyes can tell me) the 5 VDC output trace is the input 120 VAC hot trace. (So, though I haven't gone and confirmed this on a scope, so help me the output must be a "5 VDC" trace that looks just like 120 Vrms relative to ground, and a "DC GND" trace that looks the same but with a −5V DC offset.)

How many have you seen like that over the decades, I wonder? (In biomed, I'm guessing someone would put the kibosh on that.)

 

I haven't seen that configuration before, but U1 to the left is the controller/supervisor and I would look at EC3 & EC4 to make sure their working properly. Actually EC4 looks like it's missing. That's actually a good picture. There was once a day when I could clearly read those IC identifiers with my naked eyeball - Not any more.
If you got a schematic, find something you can identify and follow traces. Lots of manufacturers are 'scrubbing' IC- and board- identifiers location to make it even more difficult for people like me to repair them. Whomever is messing with that board, need to refine their soldering skills a bit. Putting too much heat on those 'chip IC' will fry them.

Sorry I couldn't be more help....

 

I think there must have been a production change. There is a silk-screened place for EC4 on the foil side (complete with a dollop of goo to hold it in place for soldering), but the other side is also silk-screened for a regular radial electrolytic mounted thru-hole, and that's where they put it.



I'm not sure how they ever thought they'd fit any SMD cap that size on the foil side ... there's no extra room beneath where the board mounts.

No schematic. I'm lucky the board is silk-screened as clearly as it is. This is an Instant Pot—a popular kitchen appliance like an automated pressure cooker with also slow-cook and baking and sous vide programs. All the programs and UI are on another board. This board is just the power supply, the relay and relay driver for the heating element, and connectors and signal conditioning for the various sensors. The manufacturer doesn't sell any internal replacement parts, even this board, which would require no special skill to replace. Their answer is discard the unit and buy another.

Which I can partly sympathize with, at a $100-ish price point. I've clearly spent more than that in time just taking pictures of the board. And I understand that the way it's built for economy would make some other repairs, like the pressure switches, difficult to carry out and calibrate in the field, with potential liability. But this board poses no such challenge.

Just galls me to throw out a whole otherwise-faultless unit for what may just be a tired cap....

Um, none of that's been messed with yet. That's factory.

Right now, the supply makes a steady 4.99 to 5.00 VDC (on a meter; I haven't scoped it to look at ripple) when the UI is awake and the backlight is on. Drops to 4.97ish when the heat relay pulls in. But when the UI sleeps and backlight turns off, the output rises to 5.18 and the circuit makes a trilling sound. Comes right back down to 5 and silent if you wake up the UI.

 

Does it quiet down if you were to (carefully) put a load - resistor across the output?

I would likely recap everything - the ceramic smd caps can get noisy when values drift (but the electrolytics are more likely to be bad).

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

the electrolytic caps tend to bloat or leak when they go bad. You can reflow all the solder points on that board. Mass production makes for bad solder joints. Ditto for electronic boards subjected to constant jolts and trauma; like our transport monitors. Reliability has gone up since they've moved to SMDs but they still fall off the board - especially those micro inductors/amplifiers. I hot glue them down when I repair them and they never come back in. Unless they literally run over them or drop them from the top of the ambulance shelf.
My suggestion would be to pick up another one at good will or some other used discount store for parts. As you stated, it's $100, so you don't want to spend too much of your precious time messing with it.
Also do a quick online search to see if someone has already nailed down the problem and has a fix. I've got bright spots on my LG flat screen and found the fix within 2 minutes. Now I just need to find time to do it......

 

Oh, right, back to the original topic. (Oddly, PriusChat didn't alert me to your reply till just now.)

Yes, the cluster should be resurrected if you find someone to just replace C3 (or feel up to replacing it yourself); there's a big thread here where the consensus developed to up C3 to a 220 µF, 35 V, 105 ℃ cap.

But a dealer won't do that for you. All they'll do is install a whole new board.