I genuinely think I’ve nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I’ve worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets:
- Main power (never have to rely on batteries)
- Fail-secure (needs to remain locked on power outage)
- Local control (no cloud latency to contend with)
- Manual override (“the house is on fire, let me out”)
Which is exactly what we have here in this week’s vid (and sorry about the section of rubbish audio; the camera mic started capturing it for a short period there). There are some edge cases I want to validate the impact of, namely the inability to keep the door both closed and unlocked, and some of the assumptions I’ve made around access methods. The laundry will be our low-impact test case; then, if that’s all good, I’ll start rolling this approach out much more seriously across the house. Stay tuned, I think this will actually be pretty awesome.
