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There's a video going around which proportedly is to sell a product called Lockitron.

To summarise the video, Lockitron is a wifi-enabled, deadlock motivator. You can lock and unlock your door remotely using the internet. Or you can use bluetooth within a certain range.

Lockitron

It looks awesome. And totally legit. Amazing, but believeable.

But then I saw this. This is the "new lockitron video". In this one they control lockitron with:

  • Bananas, by playing a song on them.
  • A magic wand
  • And mind control

That just seems over the top. Is Lockitron a legitimate product? Could you really control it using the above?

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  • explain how I could unlock my house door over the internet, which requires a physical key which I keep in my pocket? Were this possible, ALL locks would be useless, and I'd no doubt have heard from my home insurance company by now about hiring a security firm to watch my house 24/7. – jwenting Nov 5 '12 at 3:45
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    @jwenting: Look at the picture. It is a device that sits over your lock (on the inside), and turns the knob when given a remote signal. It doesn't magically open any door. – Oddthinking♦ Nov 5 '12 at 3:48
  • @Oddthinking Maybe it is magical... in the second video they use a magic wand... – Coomie Nov 5 '12 at 3:52
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    It is relatively simple - but from a security perspective using bluetooth is an ..interesting.. choice. As a gadget I like it - but would I ever use it? Not a chance! – Rory Alsop Nov 5 '12 at 10:00
  • Of course it all this relies on having that kind of door with a knob that turns – nico Nov 5 '12 at 19:40
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The question boils down to: Given we have an electronic device that can be triggered remotely (to lock or unlock a door), is it possible to produce a hardware-based solution that can trigger it by:

  1. touching bananas connected to hardware?
  2. pushing buttons on a wireless device in the shape of a wand?
  3. detecting when you raise your eyebrows, using a device that sits on your head?

The answers are:

  1. Yes
  2. Yes
  3. Yes
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    For the banana you may want to refer to (the amazing) MaKey MaKey. – nico Nov 5 '12 at 7:02
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    This appears to be the exact wand in the video: thinkgeek.com/product/cf9b As you can see, it's clearly designed to control electronic devices. – Yamikuronue Nov 5 '12 at 18:00
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Lockitron has an interesting story, I was following them quite for a while (mostly on hacker news discussions)

They approached kickstarter and were rejected, created their own crowd-sourcing application, and open sourced it, and managed to get a very nice level of orders.

More on this can be found here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/the-story-of-lockitron-crowdfunding-without-kickstarter/

All this positive media coverage, and peer reviews, adds to my confidence in their legitimacy. It still doesn't prove anything, but I thought you will benefit from knowing they are quite famous now along the entrepreneurial community (e.g. not being an unknown / questionable company is certainly helping me when deciding if to trust a company or not)

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