bought 2001 Gen 1 for my 17 yo daughter

i don't know anything about gen 1, except they are a labor of love. before jumping to conclusions, i would get a copy of tech stream and read the troublecodes

 

+1 on reading the trouble codes. Fixing yourself up with a way of reading trouble codes. That will save you hours of guessing at things, time and time again.

The plug-to-nowhere isn't anything but a slightly easier way to connect a charger ... if you have a charger that ends in the right kind of plug. In later generations you just have to open the cover and find the main relay terminals and attach there.

While the plug-to-nowhere may sound convenient, the excitement fades a bit with the realization that most homebrew charging setups aren't going to have the matching plug. And while convenient, it is still 274 volts, and can still kill you.

 

i can't say for sure, you'd need a wiring diagram. but a lot of cars are built with the same harness, even though some wires are unused. cheaper than mfg different sku's.

 

They don't have battery acid, they have potassium hydroxide, way at the other end of the pH scale. Just as unfriendly though; if you got any on your skin, be sure to wash it thoroughly off the skin you have left.

Naturally, where you might use baking soda to neutralize a battery acid spill, to neutralize a KOH spill, you need to use an acid; boric acid is what Toyota recommends.

 

You seem to be incorrectly using the word dongle. I think you mean socket.

 

Plug, connector, socket this are words you are looking for, everything in the cars is made in the way to make it impossible to fit wrong plug in wrong socket because they have different shape. unused 2 sockets are possibly for accessories like sat nav or reversing camera your car is not equipped with, just guessing.

 

dolj might have assumed that there weren't any dongles on the back of your MFD; I had a Gen 1 some years ago and I do not remember any dongles on mine. Could you post a photo of the back of your MFD that shows the dongles you mean?

 

Because it is confusing, as per your wikipedia example dongle is the device (chromecast) with the cable. Short cable with plugs / sockets on both end is just adapter cable or extension cable. When saying dongle we expect something smarter than piece of wire.

 

There definitely weren't any such cables in my Gen 1, and Molex plugs haven't ever been Toyota's style, all suggesting that there is something aftermarket going on in the car you are working on.

We're not trying to debate definitions, we're trying to distill usable information about your situation from what you are saying, so that we know what page we're on.

 

When you said this:

did you mean it? In your car, are there 4 short cables like that? Never mind what they're called.

I owned a Gen 1. I had the MFD out and worked on it. While Gen 3 has a variety of different headunits, Gen 1 was simpler than that; the MFD was 86110-47040 all three years.

I don't happen to remember any such short cables back there, whatever anybody calls them.

I mentioned that not to be "pompous" with you, but to try to find out what you have in your car.

Edit: hang on, I might still have photos from back then. let's see ....

Edit²: hey whaddaya know, good thing Mom doesn't clean this basement too often, found a photo I took in April 2008. Now I remember what you're calling the 'dongles'. That MFD didn't have its connectors panel-mounted on the back. They were on the ends of cables that emerged from the box. Indeed there were four of them.



Per the wiring diagram, that white one on the left is M5. The blue one on the bottom is M6. The blue one on top is M7. The one facing demurely downward is another white one with an especially odd shape and isn't even mentioned in the wiring diagram, and wasn't connected to anything in my car. M6 may be unused if you don't have nav. Probably this'll answer your questions.

I'm sorry this went through a detour where you felt your use of language was being made the main thing. Clearly, a lot of us have forgotten that the Gen 1 MFD was built this way (the later ones have panel-mount connectors); heck, I had even forgotten that, and I not only owned one but took pictures of it!

At the same time, there's another angle worth seeing; for most of this thread, we have been at the disadvantage of not being able to quite picture your situation. I'll accept my share of fault for not vividly remembering a photo I took 13½ years ago, but I feel pretty good about remembering to look, and managing to find it. There simply was more communication that needed to happen, and could have happened, to help everybody have the same picture of the situation.

The questions and comments that seemed misplaced to you were the indications of the more communication that needed to happen, and viewing them that way might have allowed you to let go of the combativeness and just figure out how to paint the picture more fully. As it was, the burden of trying to find where our mental pictures weren't matching, and figure out why, seems to have been carried mostly by the other participants in the thread.

 

If you had just replied to my query (of the language used) with, "No, they are not plugs. There are four sets of wires coming out of the MFD with plugs on the end of each one", all of the detour would have been avoided.

Instead you got all indignant and pompous because your understanding of a term was questioned.

For those that follow later reading later, this is a classic example of How to Not Win Friends and Influence People.

 

We weren't getting quite what Martian was saying. Martian reacted with ok, I'll repeat it louder and slower for you all, which usually is less helpful for communication than just trying to find a different way to describe the thing.

 

This is my last word in this off topic

As an electronics engineer with nearly 35 years in electronics I'm not going to change my mind, you are first person I've ever heard to use it this way. Feel free to continue if you wish, but expect people will question it like we did basically because it is wrong for us.

 

My understanding is that this was a thing on the NHW10 model, which was sold only in Japan starting in 1997. The one the rest of the world got starting in 2001 is the NHW11. The onboard charger had a 12 V input and a high-voltage DC output to charge the traction battery. The onboard 12 V battery didn't actually have enough juice to put a reasonable charge back into the HV battery; you were supposed to use jumper cables to hook up a "big" 12 V battery to the onboard 12 V battery, then turn on the HV charger.

I'm not sure why the NHW10 had that feature, other than Toyota may not have been 100% convinced that the hybrid system was going to keep enough charge in the traction battery all the time. Whatever concerns they had were gone by the time they released the NHW11 to the world. I know the Technical Museum in Munich has an NHW10, and Toyota almost certainly has one too, but I don't know if they'd let you play with or borrow the charger out of it

There are some vestiges of this in the traction battery "live data" page in Techstream. It's a little bit Engrish, but there are a couple of items that seem to indicate that the battery ECU does (or did) "know" about the possibly of having an external charger hooked up.

 

Your right about the pompous part although a few here have knowledge and many are skilled researchers even if some have never seen the problem they are speculating about. But you get what you pay for especially when you ask the internet. Terminology and grammar are easy targets. It is clear that a common dictionary will speed up understanding, but this forum often handicaps new users who have to be moderated before their clarifications are published. I guess we can thank spam bots for that since this forum routinely has been attacked in the past.

If it were me, I would punt the gen1 Prius unless I wanted it as a personal restoration project. My 17 year old daughter would certainly have a safer and more reliable Honda or Toyota without twenty year old beta hybrid technology. If she absolutely had to have a Prius, a 2016 or newer hatchback would be reasonably reliable and safe choice.

Dongles. Back in the day when low cost 16 bit microprocessors were blowing the cobwebs off traditional IBM, DEC, Data General and HP minicomputers, many of their advanced industrial algorithms were being ported over to the then new PC architectures and deployed in industrial environments. The real value of the new microprocessor systems was no longer the hardware. It was the easy to duplicate software. As a result, the widespread use of "dongles" became common for use as software protection devices. Simply put, the expensive software might run on a Toshiba 8086 laptop but only with a $5,000 hardware dongle securely attached to the printer port. So many of us think of "dongles" as software protection devices.

Dongle definition as I respond to the term - a small device that plugs into a computer and serves as a security measure to enable the use of specialized software.

Molex connectors to that crowd were exactly that, a branded style of cheap mating connectors. Certainly many decades of mating connectors preceded Molex connectors. Military and aircraft connectors quickly come to mind.

In the end, you are correct, there are many perspectives to any problem or term but, lets face it, with Priuschat the price is right.