# Legacy Black Writeable Modules for Free!



## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

If you have the Lionel Legacy system, you may know that Lionel has released writable black modules for doing updates and for saving configurations, etc. The list price of these are $19.99.

Most of us with a Legacy system already have a bunch of the blue modules that were shipped for each software update. However, these are read-only modules.

I got curious and pulled one apart, imagine my surprise when I found EEPROM chips in the modules. After consulting the data sheet for the EEPROM, I discovered that by just cutting a pin on the chip I could turn the chip into a read-write chip.

After making the modification, the formerly useless blue module now behaves like a $19.99 black module, success! So now, instead of having five useless blue modules, I have $100 worth of black modules for upgrades and configuration backups. 

Here's a picture of the modifications.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

A slightly more robust way of making the modules writable, it turns out there's a zero-ohm resistor to configure them.


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## tjcruiser (Jan 10, 2010)

John,

Just out of curiosity, about how bit are those modules? About a flash drive or so?

TJ


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Yep, they are about the size of a thumb drive. The two chips are 512k-bit EEPROM chips, so the modules have 128k-bytes of capacity. Not exactly mass-storage, but sufficient for the job. Sure beats buying them for $20/ea, I made myself five of them from the one-time use upgrade modules, I have plenty now.


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## BFI66 (Feb 7, 2013)

Thanks John, for the tip......worked like a charm-Pete


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Glad it worked out for you.


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