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Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

blog.lockitron.com

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Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#71

Post by EGreg »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #10
tzs wrote: post #4

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…

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 di…

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.

Don't you mean the other way?

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#73

Post by ender7 »

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.

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#75

Post by nodata »

ender7 wrote: post #73

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 ic…

I wondered that: does an unlock icon show that the door is unlocked, or that I can unlock it?

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#76

Post by jpxxx »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #10
tzs wrote: post #4

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…

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 di…

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. :)

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#77

Post by JonnieCache »

shabble wrote: post #64
paulgerhardt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockitron will send you a message when the door is unlocked, even if it's using a bump key.

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 :) )

The minimum viable radio jammer is a high voltage spark. Not very subtle or safe though.

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.

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#78

Post by paulgerhardt »

psychotik wrote: post #44

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,…

We used a third party payment processor for this reason. We also let people tweet their order number: https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/backer%20number%20lockitron

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#79

Post by JonnieCache »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #11
robomartin wrote: post #6

A non-Kickstarter Kickstarter?

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!)

Sorry to nitpick, but don't you mean highpass filter? You want to keep the assholes out ;)

Re: Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day

#80

Post by nodata »

atlbeer wrote: post #37
paulgerhardt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

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 a…

So the whole time you were home, your door was unlocked? Even while you were sleeping?
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