Pepper Mill Locks Your Door

April 2, 2018 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

Pepper! If you’ve ever tried to grind it, you’ve probably noticed it takes a bit of elbow grease. It’s actually possible to source electric pepper mills to grind it for you, in fact. It just so happens that [MarioM66] had one to hand, and a door lock that needed automating.

Seeing as grinding pepper requires at least as much torque as turning an average key in an average lock, the electric pepper mill makes perfect sense to use as a lock actuator. This build actually uses the electric pepper mill to directly turn the key in the lock, courtesy of an adapter to couple the square output shaft to the key. The adapter was crafted out of a moldable plastic called MultiMorph. The pepper mill is being used for its high-torque motor & gearbox, which makes it absolutely perfect for this application.

The rest of the project leans heavily on the hacker’s go-to, an Arduino and some off-the-shelf gesture recognition modules. Now, it’s possible to lock and unlock the door at the press of a button or the wave of a hand! Video after the break.

It’s great to see run-of-the-mill objects hacked into useful parts for new projects. In the same vein, check out this car that lets you fistbump to unlock.

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Simple RFID Door Lock System

September 25, 2016 by Richard Baguley 23 Comments

Group entry hacks are a favorite for hacker social groups. Why use old fashioned keys when you can use newfangled electronic keys? If you are looking to build a simple RFID-based security system to secure your important stuff, this project from Resin.io is a good place to start. In it, [Joe Roberts] outlines the process of building a simple RFID-triggered mechanism for their office door.

It’s a pretty simple setup that is composed of an RFID reader, a Rasperry Pi and a Neopixel ring. When someone places an RFID card against the reader hidden behind a poster by their front door, the reader grabs the code and the Pi compares it with a list of authorized users. If the card is on the list, the Pi triggers the door lock using a signal line originally designed to work with an intercom system. If the user isn’t on the list, a laser is triggered that vaporizes the interloper… well, that’s perhaps in the next version, along with an API that will allow someone to open the door from the company chat application.

At the moment, this is a clean, simple build that uses only a few cheap components, but which could be the basis for a more sophisticated security system in the future.

Hack Your Apartment: Keyless Entry With Little Effort

May 26, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 50 Comments

A typical buzzer for an apartment complex.

If you’ve been to an apartment complex with a locked front door, you’ve seen the buzzer systems. You press the corresponding button for the apartment you want and can talk to the resident. They can press a button to unlock the door briefly, and then you go up to their apartment and they don’t have to come down to let you in. But what if you’re the resident and you want to go for a run without your keys jingling in your pocket? What if you want to open it using just your smartphone?

I knew this was a silly problem, and everyone I told about it thought that for the amount of time and effort it might save, it was hardly worth it.

Challenge accepted.

How fast can I put this together using only parts I have around the apartment? Turns out about 2 hours.

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Add Bluetooth To A Cheap Electronic Lock

April 19, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

[James] works from home. His office is filled with objects that can be described with adjectives such as, “expensive,” and, “breakable.” His home, however, is filled with professional object-breakers known as children. To keep these two worlds from colliding, he installed a keypad lock on his office door. The potential side-effect of accidentally training his children to be master safe-crackers aside, the system seems to work so far.

However, being a hacker, the tedium of entering a passcode soon grew too heavy for him. Refusing to be a techno-peasant, he set out to improve his lock. The first step was to reverse engineer the device. The lock is divided into two halves, one has a keypad and handle, the other actually operates the lock mechanism. They are connected with a few wires. He hooked an oscilloscope to the most likely looking candidates, and looked at the data. It was puzzling at first, until he realized one was a wake-up signal, and the other was the data. He then hooked the wires up to a Bluetooth-enabled Arduino, and pressed buttons until he had all the serial commands the door lock used.

After that it was a software game. He wrote code for his phone and the Arduino to try out different techniques and work out bugs. Once he had that sorted, he polished the app and code until he reached his goal. All of the code is available on his GitHub.

Finally, through his own hands, he elevated himself from techno-peasant to wizard. He need but wave his pocket oracle over the magic box in front of his wizard’s lair, and he will be permitted entry. His wizardly trinkets secure from the resident orcs, until they too begin their study of magic.

This Car Lets You Fistbump To Unlock

February 9, 2016 by Al Williams 14 Comments

In the dark ages, you had to use a key to lock and unlock your car doors. Just about every car now has a remote control on the key that lets you unlock or lock with the push of a button. But many modern cars don’t even need that. They sense the key on your person and usually use a button to do the lock or unlock function. That button does nothing if the key isn’t nearby.

[Pierre Charlier] wanted that easy locking and unlocking, so he refitted his car with a Keyduino to allow entry with an NFC ring. What results is a very cool fistbump which convinces your car to unlock the door.

Keyduinio is [Pierre’s] NFC-enabled project, but you can also use a more conventional Arduino with an NFC and relay shield. The demo also works with a smartphone if you’re not one for wearing an NFC ring. Going this round, he even shows how to make it work with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

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OK Google, Open Sesame

February 24, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 2 Comments

There are a myriad of modern ways to lock and unlock doors. Keypads, Fingerprint scanners, smart card readers, to name just a few. Quite often, adding any of these methods to an old door may require replacing the existing locking mechanism. Donning his Bollé sunglasses allowed [Dheera] to come up with a slightly novel idea to unlock doors without having to change his door latch. Using simple, off the shelf hardware, a Smartwatch, some code crunching and a Google Now app, he was able to yell “OK Google, Open Sesame” at his Android Wear smartwatch to get his apartment door to open up.

The hardware, in his own words, is trivial. An Arduino, an HC-05 bluetooth module and a servo. The servo is attached to his door latch using simple hardware that looks sourced from the closest hardware store. The code is split in to two parts. The HC-05 listens for a trigger signal, and informs the Arduino over serial. The Arduino in turn activates the servo to open the door. The other part is the Google Now app. Do note that the code, as he clearly points out, is “barebones”. If you really want to implement this technique, it would be wise to add in authentication to prevent all and sundry from opening up your apartment door and stealing your precious funky Sunglasses. Watch a video of how he put it all together after the break. And if you’re interested, here are a few other door lock hacks we’ve featured in the past.

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Unlock On LAN Apartment Security

September 5, 2014 by James Hobson 29 Comments

Here’s a cool little variation of that handy little function called Wake on LAN — [Jonathan] found himself locked out of his apartment one too many times, so he decided to add his own fail safe backup in order to get inside without a key — using a Raspberry Pi of course.

His apartment is one of those older style ones where the door is always locked and you use a buzzer to let someone in (or a key to get in yourself). This made it super easy to add some internet connectivity to the system. [Jonathan] tapped into the buzzer with a relay since the system uses medium voltage AC to operate. A Raspberry Pi triggers a transistor using its GPIO to click the relay on and off, effectively controlling the lock.

Using a WiFi dongle he’s connected the Pi to his home network and written a simple perl script to trigger the relay — all he has to do is visit a URL on his phone or computer and the door will unlock instantly!

Once the system worked [Jonathan] soldered all the components onto a breadboard and hooked it up. He still needs an enclosure for it, but it’s been working well since he installed it.

Another option would be to use an RFID tag system through the door, which could be pretty cool as well.