Strange: I was looking for a steel tube with a key mechanism in the middle that would lock at both ends when I stumbled in here and saw your ROBOT LOCK PICKER. I thought it was pure genius and it's given me loads of other ideas. I'm really grateful. Michael.
You might need an engineering resin for strength. But they cost a good bit more. I've seen people mix a strong resin with a regular resin to make the strong resin last longer.
Doesn't the timelapse show it not working? It shows each pin going through each of its travel distances but it just keeps going. Looks like it makes it through more than 1000 iterations without success.
Have you tried any of the 3D printer filament that is powdered metal ? Supposedly you just make your part 25% too big then burn the plastic out in an oven and the metal dust turns to metal. If that actually worked you would have a stronger key insert thingy. FWIW I don't even have a 3D printer and am high atop the peak of Mount Stupid as shown on your Dunning Kruger illustration.
Super cool! I tried to make a robot to pick the sparrows challenge vault once, but gave up eventually because I vastly underestimated how much time it would take and lost interest 😅
So it takes hours and hours to pick a lock and its bulky as hell?That's not very practical. It seems like it would be easier to just pick the lock. No?
Why stepper motors instead of servos, it's not as if the stroke length needed to be long and wire wouldn't be sufficient over any length. Servos would give adequate control and force reducing build size and removing the need for linear conversion or sensing position. A metal cast key head would prevent breakage, I assume through excessive twisting as the lock is tested.
This is really good, but I cant help but spot the problem of the decifering. IMO the wires are too thin and have too much freedom, and testing each combination takes ages. Apparently there is a way to determinate the aproximate volume of a metal with electricity, you can use the driving wires as proves to measure the aproximate volume, you can maybe also use a camera and some small crystals and mirrors to look inside the lock and measure the diameter of each pin. Then test the maximun distance each pin can go. With all that calculate the posible solution and try. I also sugest to use teeth, push them with wires if you want, but I cant help but think that the small wire is prone to bend, you can also try small pipes and those precision pumps that hospitals use to precisely measure liquid pump. ( I remember some videos of people making some in 3d print) I actually dont know shit about all this, but I thought all of this was posible for someone with you skills
Make a safe-cracking robot. A group at MIT made an example, once. I almost had to make one to get into a safe (until its mechanism jammed, entirely). One of the funnest parts of a combo-lock solver is figuring out just how (and how much) you can speed up the search. You can spin the dial really fast, but you can't just stop immediately or the discs inside will keep going, so you have to program in some acceleration into your stepper code.
Very interesting. I am stunned by the tools available to prototype with today. Had they been available when I was 18 in 1973 I might have fell into the mechanical engineering rabbit hole instead of mathematics. Too bad there does not appear to be a faster than brute force approach with respect to the software algorithim. But, from my view this needs confirmed & investigated in that it like casino games is the type of probability problem that Persi Diaconis or one with a similar background in mathematics might find must behave in a manner that can be taken advantage of. I was shown how to pick locks by an old Green Benet. He had a gun like device that thru repeated pulling of the trigger opened the lock. As I remember the device worked in under a minute, and this begs the question, why....
Great project! Why not team up with another RU-vidr that has developed a DIY wire EDM machine to make your key from a blank? Also, maybe it’s better to monitor the barrel rotation motor current to determine the torque being applied and have a control loop around that.
Great job but overengeneered.. Lock picking lawyer does it in 0.1seconds. You should watch some of his videos and for example add a feature that pushess ALL of the pins UP more than usual - for locks that have no protection against pin overtravel
A fun item for a DnD game. The rogue in a party has a skeleton key that can open any common lock. However, it's huge, it's not silent and it's cursed with being slow. The picking ability is a part of the curse. If the curse is removed, the thing becomes useless.
Some remarks I had during the video. Might help with version 3. 1) You need two motors. A big one for pushing the wires and rotating the lock and a small one for "switching gears". You rarely move more than one motor at a time anyway. 2) 13:44 - Have you tried using two keys to make one? Like molding two parts and joining them because one mold would be too hard to pull off. Or you could order a custom metal part. 3) This might actually become a useful product! You could duplicate almost any key if you know its template. It does no damage, is reusable and even works on cylindrical locks.
3:33 - but you can see the security pins.... they dont work when you see them :) only if you think you can feel how they behave.- i cant see a positiv side here
Another side benefit to using this tool is you can begin to map out the locking styles of different lock manufacturers. So, for example, Master locks May only push their pins in a certain distance and or only have a certain degree of variance. All very hard information to get without having a tool that's digital. Kind of scary when you think about it...
Maybe a stupid question but why don't you use servos instead of steppers? Seems to me that a lot of makers use stepper motors every time they want *any* sort of motion ;-)
Great job! 20 years ago I dreamed of a lot mechanism that used a wire for each tumbler with a 90deg radius and the mechanism with a rotating wheel and springs to randomly go through the patterns. You've gone beyond that simple idea. Only reason why I wanted to use the wires was if one of the tumblers happened to catch in the middle , the rear tumblers would still be cycling whereas with a lock pick tool would be limited if the tumbler actuated at a low height near the middle. Please don't give up, I think you're on to something that will change the entire lock industry. In addition, hopefully will provide you unlimited resources for future development in other areas. I would be surprised if there weren't 3 to 4 novelties worth filing IP for. Hopefully you are protecting the initiative and investment of time sacrificed in your life, I'm sure what you've learned in this project is invaluable, and will be utilized again in the future for something else.
