BrightLock

A smart door lock that allows permitted guests into your house using a Bluetooth enabled app.

Comment

Table 40

Inspiration

After discussing possible internet of things devices, we settled on making a smart lock because of its current inability to allow other wanted guests into your house for a set time period or date.

What it does

BrightLock is a smart lock, for your door, that will unlock the door through bluetooth when you open its app. However, BrightLock is not like other smart locks, in the way that you can set up a whitelist of people that you want to allow to enter your house, and all you need is a name and phone number. We designed an encryption method that secures that the information cannot be stolen, nor can some random person enter your house through the app. There are so many situations in which you would like to give a friend or family member access to your house, whether its to let them in without having to open the door for them, being unable to come to the door to open it for them, or to let them in while you are away to check on your house. These are situations that we often find ourselves in, and this is much more secure than giving your key to that person because should that person never remember or resist giving you the key back, the whitelist can be changed to make sure that the person cannot have free access to your house.

How we built it

We used an arduino 101 connected to a servo in order to simulate unlocking a door. We then created an app to connect to the arduino via Bluetooth to send it an encrypted value to compare to the values stored on the board. If the sent value matches what is in the array, the servo will turn, opening "the lock".

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the Bluetooth communication on the app side was hard because none of us had much experience with coding with Swift or using Bluetooth. In addition, we struggled with passing values from the app to the board consistently for a while.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are super happy that we were able to create a functioning app from scratch that is able to communicate with the arduino.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to communicate via Bluetooth. We also learned how to better code using Swift.

What's next for Brightlock

Our next biggest thing to do would be to make certain people only able to access the house during certain dates and times. We'd also like to improve encryption and security. We'd like to add a wifi shield to the arduino to allow it to connect to the internet and theoretically change access remotely.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates