I wanted to throw in a status update. I have a few crappy pictures of the Dakota Digital speedo/tach swapout. I took it apart Friday night, then most of Saturday, cut, spliced, soldered, and shrinkwrapped all the new wires in the console. I decided after much pondering to go ahead and connect the speedo's turnsignals, neutral, highbeam, and low oil idiot lights and disconnect the LEDs on the console. Finally made that decision as I didn't want to look at more than one place especially at speed.
The only hitch I ran into is the tach signal. I must have starred at the wiring diagram for an hour trying to make sure I wouldn't disconnect something vital. Well the whole thing worked out great BUT, I found out the hard way after finishing the speedo calibration run and gear indicator calibration run, THAT THE CRUISE CONTROL didn't work [smiley=nixweiss.gif]
The tach on the '03 transmits an output signal to the cruise module. Even though the cruise module gets the same engine speed signal directly from the ECM, it still wants to see the tach output. The Clymer book labelled the signal as the green light indicator signal. I ran the diagnostic on the cruise and it gave me a 232 code. So I had to tear into the tach signal splice and reconnect it back to the tach, while leaving it connected to the new Dakota speed/tach guage. I was lucky that hooking both up to the ECM in parallel didn't fry anything. Quite a gamble. But I will write it off as me being luckier than good. Probably something about the high impedance of the analog gauge or digital, I forget which, but the ECM probably only feels one of them on the signal line.
So if anyone does this, might want to splice the ECM tach signal and the green light indicator together at the tach plug if you don't keep the analog tach, or keep both like I did.
Anyway, pictures tonight when I get home.
Steve