Hacked Apartment Intercom Barks At You Or Buzzes You In

Forgot your apartment keys? If you’ve got a ritzy building with a doorman, no problem. If your digs are a little more modest, you might only have an intercom panel that calls up to your apartment so someone can buzz you in. But if nobody is home, you’re out of luck. That’s why [Paweł] spent an hour whipping up an intercom connected automation system pack full of goodies.

entryphoneThe design is pretty simple – an ATMega328P to snoop on the analog phone ringer in the apartment when the intercom call button is pushed, and a relay wired in parallel with the door switch to buzz him in. For added security, the microcontroller detects the pattern of button presses and prevents unwanted guests from accessing the lobby. Things got really fun when [Paweł] added a PCM audio module to play random audio clips through the intercom. As you can see in the video below, an incorrect code might result in a barking dog or a verbal put-down. But [Paweł] earns extra points for including the Super Mario Bros sound clip and for the mashup of the “Imperial March” with “The Girl from Ipanema”.

True, we’ve seen a slightly more polished but less [Mario] version of this project before, but the presentation of this particular hack has us grinning from ear to ear.

[Thanks, Haxor]

17 thoughts on “Hacked Apartment Intercom Barks At You Or Buzzes You In

  1. Haha so simple I never thought of it ! Got to try it now
    My solution have been to hide a spare key on the back of a traffic sign close to my place.
    Paint it black or grey and stick a magnet on it.
    Nobody’s gonna look for it there :)

  2. I lived, for a few months, in an apartment that let you buzz people in by pressing a key on the phone. I just added the DTMF tone to the end of the answering machine greeting, so it would automatically let anyone in that entered our apartment number. It wasn’t secure at all, other than the obscurity of no one knowing it existed, but it kept me from locking myself out.

  3. I have a keychain remote for my garage door with three buttons. I have been thinking of getting an additional receiver and wiring it into the door buzzer button so I can use one of the additional buttons to buzz the door on my building open. I just don’t know if the signal will make up to my third floor unit. Might have to add a better antenna to the receiver.

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