So I was crusing along and enjoying my day when all the sudden I smell an awful scent and smoke started coming out of my vents. I pulled over, armed with my 3/4 full can of Arizona Iced Tea ready to put out the flames(already bought a fire extinguisher for the future). I determined there was no fire and something electrical blew as my speedometer was no longer working. It was the speedo board in my gauge cluster. I read up on it and the resistors tend to fail over time. The board looked like the resistor failed and fried the board. This was a great excuse to put in the intelletronix digital gauge cluster I always wanted.

After installing the new cluster, everything works great except the speedometer... No signal at all. 0mph. The brown speed wire looks fine and the only visible damage from before was on that speedo board.

I'm trying to figure out if the board damage that happened to my oem speedo chip was from further down the line. Could a bad VSS buffer have caused this?