| Figured I would share with the crowd, since I haven't posted anything useful in ages. A couple of months ago, my HICAS light started coming on after driving for about 5 minutes. The downside was power steering quit working. The upside was I got a built-in biceps workout while driving. After reading for a while I figured out that the HICAS unit was not getting a speed signal. I switched my AVC-R to show speed reading and, lo and behold, it said zero, even though the speedometer was working just fine. Further reading on tt.net and asking around I figured maybe my speedo board had gone bad. I sent it off to DVDBURN to take a look at 'cause he's the expert. Turns out it was working just fine and back to me it came. Now I dig into the ECU harness. Maybe the AVC-R is freaked out so I disconnected that wire. No dice. Maybe its the HICAS unit. Disconnected that, still no love. Perhaps the ECU was messed up so I drove up to Woody's who kindly loaned me 2 units. Again, no change. I pored over every electrical diagram in the service manual. To figure out if the wiring harness was bad, I hotwired a new wire from the back of the cluster to the ECU. BAM! Working! Some resistance testing and I discover the normal speed wire to the ECU is grounded, even with the pin pulled out of the ECU. I have been messing with this for near 2 months now with no solution. A few more passes of electrical diagrams in the service manual and I noticed that the HICAS diagram shows the speed wire goes to a small harness on the drivers side that then sends a wire to the consult port. Wait.. no... noooooo..... no no no... it can't be.... I confess. I bought a consult to usb adapter off of... yes.... Ebay. My shame knows no bounds. In a flash I ran to the garage and unplugged it. Got the normal wiring plugged back into the gauge cluster and tested the car. Everything is working again. So, even though I knew I should've known better, I figured it's just a simple adapter.. what could go wrong? Well, it worked great for some period of time and then magically decided to short out the speed signal. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Be like Cool Greg and buy trustworthy stuff. Don't be like Dumbass Buys Z Stuff From Ebay Greg. I have wasted far more money in time than the 25 bucks I spent on that stupid thing. (FWIW, that's the first time I've ever bought anything for the Z off of ebay) Thanks out to Gary (DVDBURN), Ash, Woody, and Greg D. for commiserating and making suggestions over email, facebook, and phone calls.
This is the shitty part in question
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The long way to diagnose a problem - 
