31 thoughts on “Cell Phone Controlled Door Lock

  1. Cool. Talk about a useful diy improvement. I think the creator/author of the device should patent it, if it’s not already been patented, because this could make someone a fair amount of money, if it hasn’t already.

    ~Istarian

  2. I agree with #2, especially if this could be modified to use a pay-as-you-go service. This is a very good idea.

    It looks like cheap cellphones with SMS are becoming a viable remote control and data receiver/sender. We’ll see plenty of hacks like this.

  3. #5: probably not all that farfetched of an idea. Though not sure about the stove in particular. But there are already IR controllers for lights/etc. Seems like it would be a short step to send the signal.
    Good stuff!

  4. There are all ready programs out for cell phones that will control your home computer like you were sitting in front of it. I wrote one in Java myself. This was two years ago.

  5. The more things change, the more they remain the same. I rememeber seeing a project similar to this many years ago. It used the x10 home automation telephone decoder and appliance modules to control a solenoid door strike. If you lost/forgot your keys you simply called the automation from a neighbor’s house or pay phone, turned on the particular module and the door unlocked. This was well before cell phones were widely known and before most people had answering machines.

  6. For all you college students out there who have in-dorm landlines but never use them, just hook this up to your landline phone instead of a cellphone. Call your dorm to unlock the door, and you don’t have to worry about wasting a cell phone.

  7. in israel we have that as a product for apartment houses to open the front gate. It recognizes your caller ID so it can be narrowed down to a few users.
    much more convenient than a remote , which you have to carry around anyway..

  8. How many of you have ever used those voice activated menus? The one for the US Post Office never worked for me until I started calling it all sorts of dirty names. Then it worked great.

    That sure would be fun to hack as an add-on to this… “Open the **** **** door you ****!”

  9. Just check out Homeseer.com #5 and #12. It allows me to send a text message (or use DTMF tones or speak a command) to open my front door. I can also just walk up to the door and it recognizes my bluetooth signature and opens the door when I depress the doorbell button (which doesn’t ring inside in that instance).

  10. Hey everybody…
    a friend of mine recently bought for a few euro (i think he bought 10 if this for 60 euro) a gsm unit (not properly a cell phone), that is old model from Ericsson and it has external connector for power,antenna,audio and serial!!! it’s cool, easy to implement something with it, since sim cards are so cheap, u could just use it to controll the door or heating or whatever…

  11. This sort of thing has been used by ham radio operators for remote control of radio systems for about 40 years. Before cell phones they used hand held radios and a device called a tone decoder for autopatch (remote control of telephones).

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