If you're looking to smarten up your locks to make your home more secure, then you're not exactly short of options. While all these products are aimed at offering better-connected home security, is fumbling through your phone for an app much more convenient that fumbling through your pocket for your keys? The makers of Sesame say smart locks could be a little more intuitive, and have developed a solution that, among other things, recognizes secret knocks to open up your door.
Candy House, the startup behind Sesame, is running a Kickstarter campaign to bring its smart lock to market. If this materializes, at US$99 it promises to be one of the cheaper smart locks around, with products like August priced at $250 and Danalock at $159. Further to its lower price point, Sesame is claimed to be easier to install than its competitors, be compatible with a wider range of deadlocks and be simpler to operate.
The company says that with a self-adjusting mechanism, Sesame can be installed on just about any deadlock in the US, Canada or Australia in a matter of seconds. It comes with a strip of 3M Command tape that holds the device in place over your deadlock, without any installation kit or need to pull out the tools.
The lock comes with a Bluetooth 4.0 chip that communicates with the Sesame iOS and Android smartphone app, allowing the user to lock and unlock the door with large onscreen button. But also packed inside is an accelerometer, which can be configured to recognize secret knocks as determined by the user. How effective this is at preventing home invasions might depend on the sophistication of your unique knock and whether anyone is watching when you do it, but it appears a convenient alternative to pulling your phone out of your bag or pocket.
There's also an additional Wi-Fi module, which can be plugged into a wall outlet close to the door to connect Sesame to your home network. This enables you to check if the door is locked when you're away from home, have notifications pushed to your device whenever it is opened or closed and also monitor which users are coming and going.
At present, early pledges of $89 will put you in line for one of the Sesame smart locks, while pitching in another $50 will add the separate Wi-Fi module to the mix as well. The campaign is attracting its share of attention, having raised more than $90,000 of its $100,000 goal at the time of writing. If everything goes as promised, Candy House says it will start shipping in May 2015.
You can check out the pitch video below.
Source: Candy House