My faithful Mitsubishi Delica has passed her twentieth birthday and a few bits are getting past their use by date. Spares, in general, are only obtainable from scrap yards and they are often as worn out as the part being replaced. A black curtain is working its way down the odometer display and will soon totally obscure it. The values displayed are, I presume, held in non-volatile memory in the dash ECU. My plan is to replace the current display with an OLED LCD display.together with some suitable driver circuit whose inputs will be the wires going to the existing LCD. Has anyone here attempted anything like this? Alas the only schematics for the wiring I have are a poor copy of a Japanese document and I can’t read it. Helpful advice is sought.
Dicky.
Hi Richard,
I don’t have any experience with that sort of thing myself. Hopefully someone on here can help you out!
Thanks Steven. Alas no replies, I have also tried the Delica Club forums but no one there has attempted it either. I suppose it makes it more of a challenge. 
I’ll try a few Auto Electricians to see if they can offer any advice.
Can anyone on the Delcia forums help with a wiring diagram or photos of the components you are looking to replace? That would be a good place to start.
Thanks Arnold. The Delica club has nothing to offer unfortunately. When the gear shift ‘P’ light failed I pulled the dash out to replace it. Regrettably I didn’t take detailed photos.
The odometer is served by the clump of cables centre rear in the first image. I planned to mount my odometer somewhere else on the dash but tap into those cables.
Do you know more about the LCD you are looking to replace, ie. number of lines and columns . Is it Dot matrix or 8 segment digits.
It appears to be a standard 90’s style numeric LCD that can selectively display total klm or trip. There is a select button seen just below the 180 which will switch between the two or long press to clear trip.
Beyond that I have no idea. Mitsubishi weren’t any help either, they say if its failed replace the whole dash - Oh! they’re obsolete, go to a scrap yard.
To make life really difficult the Delica was never sold in Australia, all vehicles here are imports and most have been ‘clocked’.
This may be a little tricky to do though you can probably assume that the characters are stored in ascii format.
My instinct would be to get a logic analyser and try and figure out where the data is coming from though that may be slightly more work than you want to put in.
Another option might be to find one out of a similar year Australian Mitsubishi as they probably use the same LCD unit across a range of vehicles.
Thanks Clinton. I think the current one is irrevocably embedded in the dash unit, hence my plan to make a new and better one.
