Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day
blog.lockitron.com
blog.lockitron.com
> 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.
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.
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 :) )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter
Building a proper one is still pretty easy. It's carting around a big enough battery that's the problem.
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.
I don't want my door toying with me like this.
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.
Great stuff and good luck!
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!
Sunlight will be an issue though...maybe IR and ultrasonic?
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.
Don't you mean the other way?
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. :)
There are some good ideas in here. Thank you.
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.
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.
Congrats on the success!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can I still use regular keys to get into my house?
If the wifi is out, can I still use bluetooth to get in?
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.
No reason to be disappointed - It clearly states what the new version costs on the homepage.
As confirmation, you can verify through Amazon Payments that cards are only authed for a max charge of $149.
I wonder if there's been any consideration to tying this in with Google's two-factor-style authentication system?
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?
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.
It's probably easier to kick down the door, though.
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.
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.
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.