WiFi Door Opener
We have seen our fair share of door opening hacks. Remember the secret knock door lock? That was pretty awesome, but what if I tell you that you can unlock your door from any wifi device?
The guys over at Sunlight Labs have done just that. By using a WRT54GL and some creative hacking that have wired up their wireless router to buzz open their front door.
So how does this all work? Well, let’s start with the router. It’s a Linksys WRT54GL, a still-Linux-friendly descendant of the WRT54G, the router which jump-started the custom firmware scene. There are a lot of custom router firmwares available — DD-WRT, Tomato, Gargoyle — and they can all make your consumer-grade router do some professional-grade things. For this project I used OpenWRT, the system on which many of those other projects are based. It’s got a much steeper learning curve than those other distros — you definitely need to be comfortable with the command line — but it lets you build a custom firmware with exactly the components you want. With some tweaking I was able to create a firmware that included a stripped-down version of Python, but which still fit into the WRT54GL’s meager 2MB flash memory. (Like the Arduino, Python turned out to be overkill, but at the time I expected to need it — and it’s always nice to have it handy.)
Link to Door Opener Science Project
So from what I understand they can use their phones to activate the release on the door? Therefore negating the requirement to walk to the buzzer to release the door? One word, genius!