Do you online in an area where you (or your car) are locked in by a gate? If so, you may understand exactly how [Alexander Else] feels about letting his guests in as well as out regularly with a remote manage — it’s just not convenient. [Alexander] might have just bought some additional remote controls as well as passed them out, however they aren’t precisely as inexpensive as celebration favors. Not to mention it wouldn’t make sense to hand one out to every single visitor anyway. since the entrance is a neighborhood gate, hacking the actual entrance system was not an option. There was only one thing he might do — hack the remote control!
Like just about every other hacker, [Alexander] had a spare ESP8266-based board lying around. [Alexander] likewise had a couple of spare relays which he utilized to manage the two buttons on his designated ‘sacrifice’ remote — one relay per button. After throwing these parts together with a couple of supporting bits of electronics, the hardware was done. Now [Alexander] can just set up HTTP request shortcuts on each trusted visitor’s smartphone. From there on out they can open/close the gates themselves!
Originally, he was utilizing IFTTT to activate the string of events that make everything happen, however there was a delay of about 8 seconds (from activate to relay action). [Alexander] was not having this so he relied on the HTTP request shortcuts app. When he made this change, the delay disappeared.
That’s quite excellent thinking about the near-dizzying amount of software application elements included in this project. There is the firmware on the NodeMCU board of course, as well as there’s whatever else: CloudMQTT, Python, Flask, AWS Lambda, Zappa, HTTP request Shortcuts. If you want to see exactly how all of this ties together to make his system work, inspect out his GitHub page for this project.
Looks like he’s refrained from doing yet. [Alexander] updated this job with a couple of improvements, which he put on a separate Hackaday.io page which we’ll have to keep our eye on. We have just one recommendation for this job — it might utilize some security. [Alexander] does mention adding some type of authentication/security later, to ensure that makes us feel a bit better.
There are surprisingly few electric entrance hacks around right here so if you have one, send it in! requirement a bit inspiration? This entrance was hacker-created, while this one was hacker-hacked.
