The other car I have - Hyundai Santa Fe 2003 - will be replaced this spring or summer, but still I have to do some upkeep. Including clutch replacement which I had to do few months back (cost: about 800€ total, which I will definitely not be getting back in re-sale value).
But other annoyance has been the key fob, specifically the remote control. It has apparently been troublesome in past, too, as previous owner has really mangled it at some point, to a degree it can't be closed without some external aid (he had used duct tape; ugly, ugly..)
Without this fob working the re-sale value of this car would be even lower, so I pretty much had to get it working now, so I opened it up. Battery was good, so that wasn't an issue this time.
As expected, it has single board and battery inside it. Battery here is hidden underneath the rubber part (in middle) and connects to PCB with contacts underneath.
After some probing, I figured out that this time, both buttons had some contact issues and were not toggling properly, and that solder joints on the main chip were bad too. Latter was easy fix; apply some flux, some solder and clean up. Done. Buttons, however, were a bit more troublesome, as they were a bit special - just 1,5mm thick, or 1,2mm (or maybe 1,3? can't remember now) when pressed. Not exactly common part. On picture above the buttons have been removed already (hot air station with controllable temperature and air flow is very useful for this kind of rework)
After some searching I found button that appeared to be identical to originals - but, as usual, this was no longer produced and also out of stock. Damn.
Trying to find suitable component can be sometimes difficult. Especially when you are not exactly sure what you are looking for. This wasn't even worst one to look for - parametric search most sites offer is good enough to narrow parameters down and then it's mostly browsing and checking datasheets for details.
On the other hand, I was just looking for suitable connector. In that case I didn't have any details in mind, just that I want board-to-wire connector where I can very easily change a wire, as target device was new version of test module for a finished product (so bed of nails-type tester wasn't an option). For testing I need to insert four wires to tester, run test, then disconnect. So quick and easy connect and disconnects were priority.
Opening just "connectors" page of Farnell gives me somewhere around 400 000 (four hundred thousand!) different connectors and connector parts. Fortunately I could quickly ignore some categories completely (Circular connectors, RF connectors, FFCs and so on) but still I ended up with thousands still to browse through.
I wouldn't mind browsing through thousands of connectors if the page loading were fast - which farnell's page isn't. It's sloooow. So slow that I'd actually prefer to browse old-style catalog with thousands of paper pages instead. Sometimes after some browsing I end up with handful of options which I will order some pieces to figure out with physical model with would be the best. Not this time though. In the end I couldn't find better - or even close to it - connector for this job than old spring-loaded speaker connectors I already had though of. So guess I'll settle for them for now for that job.
But back to this fob. After a bit more searching I found almost identical button. Dimensions were almost exactly same, but this didn't have similar SMD contacts than the old ones, but instead just small pads underneath. Not great fit, but close enough - I managed to get them soldered in, with fairly liberal amount of (leaded) solder and after gluing the fob back together (not a prettiest of jobs, but better than duct tape) it's working again.
So at least that's one less issue to think about.
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