I'm concerned about this feature, described on their home page:
> If you use an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5, you can enable Lockitron to sense when you walk up to the door and unlock for you using Bluetooth 4.0. We call it Sense.
Can it sense which side of the door you are on? If I'm coming in from outside, then having the door unlock as I approach would be useful. If I'm going to the door from inside, to look through the peephole to see who is pounding on the door and yelling for me to open it, I would not find it helpful for the door to unlock itself.
We're experimenting with this feature and really want it to work. We will keep refining it going forward. One really needs two radios or some very clever math to determine which side of the door one is on.
What we have done for our development version is set it up so it can be in one of three modes. Always on (for passageways) so it consistently locks as you walk up and unlocks as you walk away. Always off (always disabled). Or Manual override.
With the Manual override it still unlocks as you approach and locks again as you depart, but it also allows you to lock the door by hand after you come in and will stay locked until you manually unlock it by hand again or send it a direct command from your phone. This way it doesn't unlock randomly while you're walking up to the door to answer it.
It's our first pass at making this particular feature happen.
You already have another radio: the Geolocation stack in the phone itself. It can't tell you precisely what side of the door you are on /now/ but it can certainly be used to infer how long you've been near the house and thus, where you're likely to be.
So say if I've been GPS "home" for five minutes it assumes 'inside'. Then when a Bluetooth sense happens next it is extremely likely I'm going outside. Do not unlock.
Same three minutes without a BT sense pass, it's now nearly certain I'm "outside" still instead of going in and out. Coarse GPS event happens showing the phone is moving from the home geofence? DEFINITELY gone. Do unlock when the next BT sense happens.
Edit: I don't think I'm being clear enough on this telephone keyboard. I feel that with enough GPS logic and location history you should be able to infer when the user is likely home and thus disable auto-unlock. This all explodes when two locks are used, though... Or two authorized users... Or two egress points... Hrm. This is hard. :)
We gave something like this a shot (and missed). Collecting background GPS data and transmitting it to a third party service in the background is currently hard and battery intensive. Highlight does it though!
We're experimenting with this feature and really want it to work. We will keep refining it going forward. One really needs two radios or some very clever math to determine which side of the door one is on.
This could be an added incentive for customers to purchase your hardware for both their front and back doors. Then they've got two radios.
In two-door installations, it may be possible to look at the signal strength as received at the back door to tell when the user is inside the house. That could get you out of the time-of-arrival calculation business.
Another possibility is a small, cheap IR sensor. If there's a person inside the house within ~10 feet of the door, it doesn't unlock automatically. The basic idea would be similar to the sensors on toilets and urinals in public restrooms.
In any case I'm glad to hear that my Tom Swift amulet is finally being made. Next up, the Triphibian Atomicar!
I started to write my own version of this a while back but, it relied on some "server-side" work.
I had a daemon running inside my house which looked for my iPhone on the internal WiFi network. When my phone went off-line it signaled that I had "left" and after a certain duration went into "watch-to-unlock" mode. When my phone reappeared on my network I would signal to unlock.
I know you are probably trying to keep as much of the logic off the perimeter of your ecosystem (Phone App and in-home hardware) but, it was the best way I could figure it out.
For what it's worth, I have some home automation setup that checks for my iPhone's presence on wifi (my phone gets on wifi every ~10 minutes on battery, and holds a connection when plugged in). I preordered a Lockitron, and plan to use the API in my "welcome home" script trigger to unlock the door.
I'm not sure how easily you could implement this sort of detection on Lockitron's end, though. I use a static DHCP lease on my router and simply ping the phone.
Just thinking out loud here! Wifi presence seems super useful from my limited experience, and I'm not sure why more tech things aren't using it.
You should be able to figure out if the signal is coming from inside vs. outside based on signal attenuation. Systems are being developed to pinpoint user location indoors based on this technique. Fortunately, your use case is more binary: Is the bluetooth signal passing through a door. Any dBm above a certain number would just be assumed indoors.
Have you considered a patch antenna or something similarly directional right on the PCB? Still only one radio and reasonably robust direction detection as far as "is the signal coming from in front of me or behind me" is concerned.
What we have done for our development version is set it up so it can be in one of three modes. Always on (for passageways) so it consistently locks as you walk up and unlocks as you walk away.
Then (as is the answer to many of the security concerns people have with Lockitron) just don't enable that feature.
Also, anyone that's seriously worried about the security of this device should be mostly concerned that the standard keyhole still exists on the other side of the door because they're trivial to bump or pick.
To play devil's advocate, it is less conspicuous to open a door that you can hack open with your phone than it is to pick or bump it (Although depending on your skill, picking it may be a very easy thing too).
I wonder what the minimum viable wifi-jammer is here?
Have you considered any sort of pingdom style monitoring for that sort of thing?
(Obviously, it's a really unlikely scenario right now, but if they can keep it off the air long enough to open the door and introduce it to Mr Big Hammer, notifications may not be forthcoming :) )
It probably has a proximity timeout -- if you're out of range for more than x number of minutes, it will consider you 'gone'. It may not be passive, and may send you a request via Bluetooth for unlock. I imagine they have this worked out well enough to advertise it :)
Maybe a cool feature would be if it didn't unlock automatically, but put it in "unlockable" mode, and would unlock when you knocked on it. You would still have the convenience of unlocking automatically (if your hands are full, use your knee or something), and it wouldn't unlock when you're in the house
Lokitron looks great, but you guys have got to fix the UI on the unlock screen. Every time I see it I have to stare at it for a couple of seconds to figure out a). what the current state is and b). how to change the current state.
The swiping action is neat, but there's nothing in the UI to convey that swiping is what you should do. Also, the paradigm is really screwy -- if the door is unlocked, I swipe the unlock icon to be on top of the lock icon, which then transforms the unlock icon into a lock icon, but leaves a new unlock icon behind in the original place?
I think you would be better served by duplicating Apple's standard toggle switch UI (you can flip it to be vertical if you want to). You can also add a progress throbber to the (normally blank) slidable bit if you want to indicate an "intermediate" state.
Awesome! I love the concept and will purchase one after I move from a condo with an auto-locking door system, which i loathe! :(
From a product design perspective, maybe consider a rock-solid brushed metal version.. if not purely for asethetic appeal for snobs like me, but also to project the sense of security and that's something to think about holistically in your marketing which the website barely touches on. Your device carries a big burden; peace of mind about my family's security — not the replaceable materials within it.
I think overall the design looks really good, but something about it feels Fisher-Price. I know that might seem superficial to some but that was my immediate reaction.
I'd like to second this. The product looks very flimsy. (This is to say nothing about the actual security it provides.) One would think a more menacing lock that also works really well would also work two-fold as a preventive measure for would-be thieves.
This goes on the inside of the door. Would-be thieves would never see it.
The image lower down on the page (next to "Easily install") is MUCH clearer about what this is and how it works. If the creators are reading this, I'd suggest swapping it in for the image in front of the video.
Thanks, that sure is embarrassing. It looked to me like it went on the outside, but I realize now that I was wrong. I still think it would still be nice to have it look sturdier.
It's installed on the inside of the door, on top of the existing locking system.
My comment was mostly about consumer confidence when it's hanging on a j-hook at a retail store, or standing alone through through another distribution outlet.
I agree - the v1 product (no longer on the website as far as I know; it replaced the original deadbolt) simply looks sturdier. While this will tend to increase overall security since you'll any time when the door is unlocked and can always re-lock it remotely, it does unfortunately look a bit flimsy, despite not altering the original deadbolt.
Maybe that's just the renderings? Dunno, but something that looks a bit more industrial could well go a long way here. Kinda like having the login and password boxes on two different pages, common on banking websites: it accomplishes precisely nothing for actual security, but makes people who don't know any better feel safer.
I really hope that this trend we are seeing is the beginning of an explosion in very high tech home automation and improved appliances in America. We're fantastically underserved, we're increasingly able to automate manufacturing of small systems like this, and there is a very popular revival of the small startup DIY culture going on.
Because you can imagine lots of otherwise unemployed people learning the basics of programming, microcontrollers, low-voltage digital electronics and servos, and making a ton of incredibly useful, modular stuff. It's not even that wild a dream.
I'd be interested in how the devices talk to their servers, and if they have control to unlock the devices. It would be smart to have public / private keypairs for each device capable of unlocking, so that even they could potentially not be allowed to unlock it. I want to see if this service gets hacked and someone issues a mass-unlock signal.
Not that I don't believe the fine folks at Lockitron, just a question about this Kickstarter-on-your-own-site thing that seems to be catching on. Since this isn't audited by an independent company (like Kickstarter) how do you blindly believe what the company says? Doing so would be a smart way to build more buzz, resulting in more success.
PS: The blog is down, so I'm not sure if they presented any visual evidence, such as an Amazon screenshot. But that's easily doctored too.
The amounts are published by Kickstarter and they're the ones collecting the money and passing it to the project, so there's no question that they're correct.
The complaints had to do with the delivery of the product after the project was funded.
I showed this site to 3 different people and asked them: "How much do you think the product costs?". They all said $149.
No where does it say on the main page that it actually costs $295. I found this in the blog at the end of a post: "For $295 and no monthly fees you can order a Lockitron deadbolt kit that can be installed in about 15 minutes".
The above statement was part of an answer to "What is Lockitron?". I would have thought that this is the most common FAQ, but it does not exist on the first page.
Left a sour taste and am disappointed. Though nothing illegal, certainly deceptive.
Sorry about that! As other commenters have mentioned, that was a holdover from our first generation lock. It has been updated to the correct price now.
As confirmation, you can verify through Amazon Payments that cards are only authed for a max charge of $149.
Has anyone done a thorough security review of the lockitron hardware, etc.? While I know physical locks aren't that secure, people that couldn't get in easily with a physical lock might be able to trivially get in with an electronic one.
I wonder if there's been any consideration to tying this in with Google's two-factor-style authentication system?
I agree with the hardware review, my major concern is not the cool digital part but the actual bits and pieces because locks break all the time, and this is essentially adding another layer that can break.
Do you keep logs? The idea that you've got a record of every time I've entered or left my house creeps me out enough that I wouldn't use this as a customer. On the other hand, if I were building this, I'd be pretty interested in what I might be able to do with this data.
Great that the pre-orders have been such a success ... but still, that's ~3-3.5k units. Is that a lot of sales for this kind of product? It sounds low, but I might just be benchmarking off of the digital goods numbers I'm used to hearing.
We don't take the money up front. We're authorizing cards as a minimal low pass filter. Primarily we need to know how many to make (or if anyone wanted one at all!)
I should have added a smiley face or a little more text.
The question was actually intended a bit differently than I realize you (and others) may have interpreted.
It is VERY clear from your site that you are NOT charging anyone until you ship the product they are buying. Hence the "non-Kickstarter Kickstarter" comment. In other words, you are not doing anything like Kickstarter at all yet you are gathering commitments and gauging interest.
I shouldn't have left it open to interpretation. Sorry.
FYI I downloaded your app a couple months ago with the hopes I could use it to replicate my NFC card for my building, but I hit your login-only screen.
Can you make an a "Lockitron Labs" app or something similar that allows you to read third party NFC keys and replicate their signal on demand?
Actual NFC keys (as implemented on NFC phones) don't work like this -- they are much more secure (think of an exchange of freshly calculated encrypted information rather than broadcasting an unchanging code) and can't be copied.
Wouldn't it be possible to reverse engineer then? If you ping it with several different signals, you can interpret the responses and analyze the encryption - right?
This would be an incredible feature. Unfortunately, even within NFC the range of standards and encryption types across card types means you can't consistently do this.
Our NFC implementation is really the reverse of this - rather than beaming a code, you are reading an NFC tag to trigger your app to send the command.
Such a great product, this solves a massive problem I have when away and using Airbnb for my flat and having to get my poor mum to have to come round to let them in each time so will definitely be ordering one.
p.s as its often difficult to ask on Kickstarter, but out of curiosity, what tools / hardware did you use to create the video, its pretty neat.
We borrowed a (very generous, awesome) friend's Cannon DSLR. And another (very generous, awesome) friends Zoom H4N and Røde Shotgun mic for sound.
Rough cuts were made using iMovie (super low tech but very quick) and once we settled on an approach that was 'working' we polished it up in After Effects.
Most of the trick to "good enough" photography or filming is good lighting. For this we borrowed some other (very generous, awesome) friends' lights. For outdoor shots were we couldn't use artificial lights; we waited till the Magic Hour (dusk). We got a door frame from Home Depot and drove it up to the top of Skyline to get one of the shots with the scenic overview.
I stayed with the founders 2 years ago in Palo Alto after Startup School. I remember they opened the door remotely for me when I arrived and there was nobody home, it was amazing.
I had lost track of them until now, I'm really glad to see all the interest and support they are getting.
Thank you for hosting me. Even though briefly, I really enjoyed my stay with you. Congratulations for your hard work and persistance, I hope you guys do great!
sigh Another non-standards-based IoT device for the short sighted and excitable Kickstarter crowd. An equivalent to the level of interoperability that the web introduced is coming to the IoT space. These proprietary things are and most certainly will become junk.
I kind of like that it has no external surface. I'd even consider removing the keyhole if it worked well and just having a perfectly smooth door. (would have to auto close the door and have a deadbolt snib thing)
> If you use an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5, you can enable Lockitron to sense when you walk up to the door and unlock for you using Bluetooth 4.0. We call it Sense.
Can it sense which side of the door you are on? If I'm coming in from outside, then having the door unlock as I approach would be useful. If I'm going to the door from inside, to look through the peephole to see who is pounding on the door and yelling for me to open it, I would not find it helpful for the door to unlock itself.