Free Black or Orange Modules for Legacy

They are all the same.  As I was alluding to in one of the other threads.

So, one wonders, why charge MORE for a module you don't have to pre-program and less for ones that take extra production work?

Which again was my point.  The charge for 1.51 IMO should be at minimum the cost of 2 black modules roughly.

If you had to pay $40 for upgrades every time you'd probably learn or find someone to make them for you.  Right?

From this thread...

From what I understand, they are the same modules.  They are set to be read only or read/ write depending on the need by the factory.  It would seem the writable module should be cheaper as you do not have to go through the procedure to set them to "read only".

Mine didnt work but after your picture i see what i did wrong works now. Thanks for the info.

And make them read only.

 for the blue modules, you have to program them with the version you're shipping.

John, bear with me I am new to this. By "cut the pin", is this done with a exacto knife or with small wire cutters? 

Nice one! Gunrunnerjohn. I could not get hold of any black modules on my last US trip.

 This saves the hassle of getting one shipped to the UK.

I'll try this tommorow.

Cheers

Nick

Jeff, you can cut the pin right at the chip with small cutters or an X-acto knife.  Just make sure that's the only pin you cut.  It just has to be floating, however you do it.

Let us know how you make out with the mods Nick.

I confess I thought it would be harder, I was a bit surprised to see the EEPROM chips in there.

John

It worked great and now I have two black modules and now I am upgraded to 1.51 for my base and Cab2 Thank you very much.

Great find John.

Ron

Nice work John, I now have 6 that work great I will be giving two with file on them to my brother so he can upgrade.

Hacking at its best John!

John, I think you post is going to be responsible for many people upgrading to 1.51 that may not have. As noted above people with the savy and extra blue modules will be making them available to people afraid of the download process. You have changed the world...lol.  Sincere thanks. 

John, hacking in the finest sense helping those who are victims of the big boy's uncalled for price structuring. Now if only someone could hack MTH's proto and Lionel's TMMC and Legacy programs to allow consumers to customize station and crew talk announcements, that would be fantastic. Any computer savy programmers among our forum members who are willing to take on such a feat?

I'm glad it worked out for everyone.  Like I said, it was way easier than I imagined, I just opened one up because I was curious what was in them.

I think that's just a bit more complicated!

I just lifted the pins of the ones in the picture.  However, after verifying this works as intended, I just did six modules by simply cutting the pin off the chip right at the chip.  I verified all six modules work as intended after the surgery.  The black paint is drying on the shells now.

I also decided to change the topic, these really end up free if you do them yourself.

Success!!!  took the module into the sun and saw the pin used an X-acto knife tip and fliped out the pin. 

Thanks John!

John, Thanks for posting this great tip!.

Success, 1.51 installed (upgraded direct from 1.3)

Nick

I see no reason that the Orange modules would be any different than the blue or black ones, I'll bet the white generic ones are the same as well.

Piece of cake!   I just made six of them, I even took the shells down and sprayed them black.  If I weren't so lazy, I'd probably buff off the paint from the Lionel logo and make them look just right.

I guess it's working for sure.

One tip for folks converting multiple modules at one time.  Keep the two halves of the shell together and put them together as one at the end.  When you pull them apart, the glue doesn't always separate exactly the same, so the best fit will be the original pieces together again.

As I said early on.  They are all the same.  Just depends on what they were originally purposed for if they were to be read only or writable.  I really don't see why this is such a revelation. 

I credit John for doing the discovery.  But you had to believe that the modules were the same and just were write protected in some fashion.

Thank you John!

You will be known as we called em in the IT a "Ethical Hacker" Breaking limitations on product so that you can do it yourself at home instead of incurring extra expense.

The original term of hacker was simply to change the physical "Hardware" and wiring so that a item modify a behavior to whatever it is you seek.

I feel that sharing these kinds of tricks are very useful.

I agree Marty, I did think that maybe they used OTP parts for the R/O modules, but when I found the EEPROM, the rest was obvious.

The white modules will not work, they only have 1 memory chip

not the 2 required to program the base and cab2.

The orange modules most likely are the same as the white ones.

I think moving the "zero ohm" resistor R1 to R2 location will accomplish the same thing.  Maybe easier than cutting pins on an IC.

White modules?  LOL!  I forgot all about those ones.  Never did use them.  Interesting.  I guess they don't need a lot to basically do nothing.

I still suggest moving the zero ohm jumper, as the Atmel spec sheet states that the floating of the Write Protect pin is OK as long as the pin has less than 3pf coupling to the external circuitry. 

Floating the pin can cause corrupted data to be programmed into the module, and while it may seem that all is well, your upgraded Cab2 or Base may exhibit strange behavior from bad code. 

Not worth the risk, move the resistor, or get a black module to be safe.

John,

First off, Great tip on re-using those blue modules.  I plan to mod 2 of mine by moving the resistor.

I think people should be cautioned that they are not upgrading the system as per Lionel's specs.  If the CAB2 gets corrupted as Jon pointed out, and causes a problem, its really on the user since they did not want to spend the $17 for the black modules.

Odds are the upgrade will go OK, but if something starts acting weird, who would even think to ask the user how the system was last updated?  It may be hard to figure that one out.

Joe

FWIW, I have two real black modules I use for upgrades, I'm going to use these for storing configurations.

I really started this on a whim, I just figured I had all the useless blue modules and decided to see what was in one of them. 

John

I am totally not seeing the "jumped wire" can you highlight the change in the pics

has anyone who removed the two pins had any troulble with their update?  I have not.

John,

Great info. Worked the first time.

Thanks,

Frank

John would you post a larger picture of the zero resister changes with more descriptive lables for us vision challenged OF's.  Thanks Bruce

Interesting that the Zero Ohm resistor seems to be marked as a diode (D1) both on the board and the device.

Pete