Don't Let Customers Punk You In Charging low/How to wake Up a MCU in protection Mode

[lexidime]

If a client comes to you for this type of service: he or she really needs it. Our services are not luxury items! These clients comes to you out of necessity or desperation! Bill accordingly!

Here's a nice weird story: a person calls for a correction on a 2016 lexus RC. We gave our labor and they replied that they received an 80 quote elsewhere; if we could do better. We told them "sorry but we can't match that number"
2 days later a guy calls us about the same year, make and model. Saying that he's a professional corrector and he'll give us 250 to help him figure out an issue with a dash. He says after he programmed it, the cluster went dead! We asked him what tool did he use. He said a digiprog3

So we told him to bring the car and the cluster. It turns out that this car belonged to the same customer that called with that low ball 80# The corrector used a clone digiprog 3 to try to do the 2016 lexus rc350 from the lexus drop down menu on his 2009 DP3.

So we removed the c66. Reflash it with a new dump - "no correction"
cluster - still nothing! > Installed a brand new c66 same thing. To make a long story short these MCU have a feature call "COP" "LOL" it stands for ( Computer Operating Properly Reset). It will shut down the MCU if it receive corrupt data that will compromise the operating memory programmed in the MCU, not the external EEprom. To reset it depends on the MCU. Some is a simple reset pin held High or low for the amount of clock cycles stated on the data sheet or you will have to raise the reset and clock pin on the board power up the MCU only and feed the SRST + SCL on both pins using a function generator which was the case for this lexus and it worked also good for dead Audi clusters too. 16mhz for 32 clock cycles. all is well save the guy $2,286.55. He didn't even know that his $100 digiprog is a cheap clone. We test it on a few boards and it failed! it couldn't even do a 68HC912B32 or a NEC uPD780973. When he saw the results; he took it and smashed it to pieces on the ground. never a dull day at work.
Moral of the story is to show you one prime example out of so many how going cheap can go so wrong. Just buy all original tool they offer good Tech Support! The Cheapest providers are always never respected! IE APPLE VS ACER. As your reputation goes up so will your clientele. Word of mouth will supersede any advertisement. Always quote base on the value of your service to cover your expenses + to grow your tool library :Air removal tools, pencil irons, oscilloscope, function generator ,multi meters, controlled power supplies, spectrum analyzer, plus original correction gear! If we didn't have these diagnostic tools to measure the behavior of this cluster it would have been tossed in the trash and cost the customer and/or corrector over $2k