If anyone has an inoperative or inexpensive SE/SS fob, I'll buy it or gratefully accept it for a destructive experiment to determine just how small it can be made without loss of function. My previous unit was about half the bulk of the original, and it worked fine, but it's been lost. This time I will do the job more carefully, and will document the process for the benefit of others. I think it can be cut apart and then reconfigured as a two dimensional array like a credit card, with no reduction of performance. In fact, I have some RF experience, and might be able to enhance performance by modifying the antenna to exploit the additional perimeter of the credit card dimensions. Henry
I want to use a nonfunctioning unit when developing the protocol for "shrinking" the product, so programming isn't a problem. When I shrunk my first unit, I had to be very careful so left far more plastic than necessary. My current plan is to simply destroy the broken unit and make measurements, then set up my Unimat (a tiny milling machine) accordingly. As for reprogramming a working fob, that's trivial.
I'll be watching this thread with interest. I would like to see a smaller "key", but can't help you with a dead one.
One more point - in my cut-down unit I embedded a high-intensity LED. It worked from the same CR2032 battery and used its own micro switch. On a complete redesign, that would be easy to integrate. Today I wrote to David at Coastal, asking if he'd like to take on that project - standardizing a fob modification. ...but back to square one, I need another fob. I'll bite the ebay bullet, I guess, but would really like to find a broken one on which to do exploratory surgery.
