Car Key Fobs Are Way Too Big, But You Can Solve That Problem

Car keys used to be simple metal objects, and you could fit a ring of them neatly in your pocket. Today, just about every car comes with a bulky key fob that’s chunky and just a little difficult to stuff in your jeans. One man has decided enough is enough. He’s slimming ’em down!

Meet Jeremy, the man behind RACECAR go brrr!, a business that made a name for itself selling custom switch panels. However, it’s also a great place to go for a slimline key fob conversion kit. Jeremy develops them himself, and sells his designs online for others looking to save some space on their keyring.

Jeremy found his way into this out of a desire for simple convenience. “Originally it was just because I was fed up with the massive fob on my own BRZ,” he says. He’d recently bought a 3D printer to mess around with, and figured out a smaller key fob enclosure would be a great starter project.

The basic concept is simple. The guts of a key fob usually contains a single printed circuit board with some buttons, and a small battery. Factory fobs are often designed to feel nice in the hand, with a certain heft and visual style expected from the customer. However, they’re rarely optimized for size. It’s quite simple to whip up a lightweight 3D-printed shell that does the same job without taking up nearly as much space.

As stated on the site, some sacrifices are required in the name of space. Jeremy’s enclosure dispenses with the physical key that the fobs include for accessing the vehicle when the battery is dead. The fobs also ditch the weather-sealing gasket and the silicone button interface layer. Instead, you’re pressing through the enclosure directly onto the tactile buttons on the PCB. It’s not a big deal, but it’s worth noting if you regularly like to throw your keys into puddles.

At first, the project was solely a personal one, but he realized it would surely appeal to others. “I was never happy with the print quality of the fobs until more recently when I got a new printer,” he says. “At that point I tossed them on my site to see if anyone else wanted one, and I’ve since sold a bunch of them.”

Things soon moved beyond the BRZ. “My girlfriend got her Supra, and asked me to do the same to her fob,” explains Jeremy. “She found the combination of her Subaru key and the Supra key was too much, and she didn’t like having both on the same key ring at the same time.” He spent the time to whip up a BMW-compatible enclosure, since that’s what the Supra uses, and now offers them on his site as well.

Jeremy’s designs only cover a very limited number of Subaru and BMW models, along with the modern Toyota Supra, but his work should serve as an inspiration to anyone else out there desiring a slimmer fob. There’s nothing stopping you from whipping up a design in some free CAD software, and printing out your own size-reduced fob enclosures. Indeed, this is the power of 3D printing, which democratizes the production of small custom plastic products.

It’s a neat project from Jeremy, and it’s even neater that he’s making these enclosures available to the broader public. Nobody should suffer with unsightly key bulges in their pants, especially as we’re coming up to the summer season.

Image credits: Racecar Go Brrr

The post Car Key Fobs Are Way Too Big, But You Can Solve That Problem appeared first on The Autopian.