Sudo Room is a hackerspace in downtown Oakland. We try to let people open our doors automatically without physical keys, and this is part of how we do it.

SETUP

We have two doors - the first door enters our building from the outside, and is controlled by the software under outer_door/

The second door enters Sudo Room from the hallway. This has several components:

• A Raspbery Pi running a tornado web server - it has a password-protected user interface and its code is in inner_door/
• The server sends commands over RasPi's UART Rx serial pin using PySerial
• The pin is wired to a Texas Instruments MSP-EXP430G2 development board, running code you can find under msp430/ (especially at msp430/doorman/doorman.c)
• The MSP430 runs a stepper motor, controlled by something like an L293DNE dual H-bridge
• The motor rotates 3D-printed gears in a 3D-printed house, which turn a physical key in the lock. The models for these are in models/

TODO

• Model files are not up to date, but more importantly, move away from blender for modeling. (maybe Autodesk Inventor Fusion)
• Add OpenSCAD/MCAD code for the gears
• Change gear ratio to make unlocking work better (stronger, as the key or lock-knob probably requires quite a bit of force to rotate)
• Add a mechanism for detecting end-of-rotation
• Upload electronics schematics and photos