You could always tell who had friends with that one.

Posted at 6:46 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by anon

That’s not much of a security feature, since you could always just hardwire power to the relay. Nevertheless, it’s cool.

Posted at 7:11 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by Entropia

I liked it

Posted at 8:08 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by babble

I think I would prefer to use DULLARD though.

Posted at 8:09 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by babble

@babble Ha! All your base are belong to us!

On a related note, this would be cool to use as some sort of door access system (if you could set up a timeout to prevent brute forcing). Another option would be to unplug the controller from the door (and carry it with you like a key). With the micro controller storing the last ten buttons even on a successful code entry, there’s a slight problem if someone ever gains read access to that array. But then again, I would go with a brute force attempt first knowing that you only have 8 buttons… we can infer that he’s pressing 10 buttons and then estimate that there are just over 1.073 billion options… given the UI, I would start the brute force at UUDDLRLRAB as a guess to try and shorten the number of combinations tried before success.

But who cares? This is up there with the external hard drive hidden in an old battery-less uninterrupted power supply. Nice work Joven.

Posted at 8:39 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by daryl

Mixed feelings about this. on one hand, it’s an awful lot of trouble for just 1 gig, but i wouldn’t want to sacrifice a 16 or 32 gig until i tested it on a 1 gig. second, all it takes is a screwdriver and jumper wire and you can bypass the relay so it’s not very secure.

overall a wonderful start, i hope he moves it up to a larger storage of solid state drive and remolds the case and seals it with epoxy. this has a lot of potential

Posted at 11:02 am on Oct 11th, 2009 by aztraph

16GB USB flash drives are as little as £17.50 (play.com), got 3 of them, very nice & very fast.

If you want to prevent someone from easily just bypassing the code you could cover it all with epoxy – sure it wouldn’t prevent the most stubborn but it would stop it being easy.

Despite it not being very practical it’s a nice hack, and some of the best ones aren’t practical.

Posted at 12:45 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by Haku

Very curious why he didn’t just cut out the matrix decoder and wire the buttons directly to a flash drive that already has a pushbutton lock feature (maybe because the controller has 8 buttons and those drives only have 4?). I cut out the decoder for my wireless NES controller mod to attach the buttons directly to wireless numeric keypad hardware.

Posted at 2:59 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by Ryan

Why a relay? Why not just run it off the arduino directly, or through a transistor? Not like it needs that much current…

Posted at 5:14 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by atrain

Someone should take this a step further and incorporate a flash drive into a Simon game so you have to get X number of sequences correct before you get to use the drive.

Posted at 5:36 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by Haku

@atrain: Most USB Thumbdrives will take upwards of 100mA when under full load (reading or writing). And, most microcontrollers can only source or sink +/-25mA.

As you suggest, a transistor would work, though wiring the power directly to the Arduino probably would not. A relay is a bit overkill, but maybe he wanted the satisfying click of it kicking in?

Posted at 8:24 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by Shadyman

That click is quite satisfying to us old analog folk.

Posted at 9:39 pm on Oct 11th, 2009 by blizzarddemon

You could simulate the click with a small pizo speaker connected to the microcontroller…

Ow, stop throwing 500A contactors at me, analogue folk! ;)

Posted at 10:17 am on Oct 12th, 2009 by Haku

hello

Posted at 3:22 pm on Oct 14th, 2009 by charlosky

Pretty cool.
I wonder if there is enough room inside the case to add a usb hub so it could function as a flash drive and as an NES controller for your PC.

Posted at 5:27 pm on Oct 14th, 2009 by gezepi