DIM info screen miraculous revival, and missing LEDs repaired! ('07 XC70)

[tfo]

hi all,

[TL;DR, fixed info screen, but i'm missing the LEDs for the general warning light (yellow, red), and the warning lights for TPMS and DTCS. i also suspect whoever was in here before also messed up my steering angle sensor, which i'm also catching codes for. will post updates when i take off the steering wheel.]

over the last two days I finally took my DIM out of the car. my info screen that was supposed to show MPG and remaining range wouldn't work properly, with having it try to turn on but not displaying anything. it's been like that since i bought it in March, at around 156k mi.

when i took the unit inside i found several of the plastic clips holding it together bent or broken, so I now know someone had been in there before...

i immediately saw that the ribbon cable for the info screen looked a little crumpled or mishandled in some way, and continued disassembling.

further in, the screen just fell out of its housing- the cable wasn't even plugged into the connector.
here's a closer look at the ribbon cable.

so i looked around the board some more, and found that some of the LEDs were missing, like from the general warning light and from the right side lights.

it looks like they weren't de-soldered from the board, but scraped off by a screwdriver or something. no wonder i was getting codes thrown for warning lights not lighting up- the lights were missing!

buttoned it all back together, making sure i properly connected the ribbon cable to its connector, unlike the previous "mechanic," and what do you know:

it just works now.

[scot850]

Sounds like someone trying to pull a fast one over when selling the car by removing warning lights. Great job repairing what you did.

Neil.

[tfo]

guess what: i soldered new LEDs to the board last night and they work perfectly. now that i have way more soldering experience (as an electronics repair tech), i tackled this one after sitting on the new LEDs i ordered off of Digikey since ~February.

i opened the package and realized they were... WAY smaller than the ones that came with the car. but i sent it anyway- tiny light is better than no light. it was already broken anyway.

right-hand side LEDs; replaced with clear (as opposed to diffuse) orange ones (should probably be Yellow instead, to match the others)

center warning light LEDs; i placed an orange one on the right (labelled LED 16 above), and a red clear one on the left (LED 17). didnt feel like looking up documentation, but assumed LED 16 was the yellow, "medium" warning, and that LED 17 was the "high alert" warning.

video of the indicator cluster working:

1c13eb48-5997-45f8-a6f2-8bffcebba37e.mp4

(9.64 MiB) Downloaded 51 times

note: the SRS service airbag message was displayed as well, and the orange warning light came on! im wondering if this is the light that is expected to activate for this DTC. will find out once i clear codes later.