The world is desperately trying to produce a smart door lock that works, is easy to install, even easier to use and that looks good too. I have written in the past about smart locks from companies called Kevo and August. Both were early attempts at the technology and were on the fairly expensive side. However, a new player is on the market, another American company called Sesame. And it’s their crowdfunded project that could move this technology on further. Here is their promotion video:
“Any lock in the world”
It’s a fairly polished video, one that gets the point of their new product across. But in those 105 seconds, one of the stand out points was the part where the lightly bearded man said that Sesame was a product that could be used on any lock worldwide. If this is true, then it doesn’t matter that this is an American product, as it could be sold and exported to any country in the world, including ours.
But lets take this claim with a pinch of salt. The door and lock used in that video was nothing like the doors we have over here. Many of our residential doors are now PVC, with a Europrofile door cylinder and a central gear box. Nothing like the door in the video. So I imagine that very model shown would be useless on that type of door.
However, only from what I could see in the clip, it’s more than feasible that the same technology could actually be adapted to fit a UK PVC door. The lock could be made to fit the profile of our door handles, and maybe some attachment that could slip into the inside of the cylinder? I’m not an engineer, but we have enough clever people around to make it happen!
Undercutting the price
The previous models I have looked at in this area have been in the hundreds of dollars bracket, like the August smart lock which retails for $250. The August smart lock is also being sold on the Apple Store. But the Sesame model is aiming to retail for a bargain $89.
On the surface, $89 is very cheap for the amount of technology that you get for the product. You’ll need to shell out $139 dollars if you want the model that comes with the WiFi dongle. Whether this company manages to reach it’s $100k crowdfunded target and is then able to export to different markets is unknown. But I would imagine that if Sesame wanted to sell these theoretically to the UK I imagine they would retail at the same numbers except in sterling.
Either way, these price points make the technology very accessible to a wide proportion of the available markets and countries they are going to aim at.
Secret knock
There is one feature that does concern me, the personlised knock and entry feature. With this product, it’s possible that you can knock on your phone or door in a certain way and the product will give you entry. Whilst this is a novel and physically quick way to get your door unlocked, I can see this being a potentially risky feature that could quite easily be bypassed.
However a security feature I was impressed with was the military grade encryption this product is going to come with. Previous smart locks haven’t mentioned something like this, and hacking has been an area of concern for me with smart home gadgets. But with such a high level of encryption, hackers should struggle to get past this.
So, why am I taking such an interest in products like this in America? Well, although the products are American, I firmly believe that they are going to come to the UK market. The technology is becoming easier to adapt to different products and markets as the years roll on, and as we become more tech savvy on this side of the pond, we’re going to start to see these sorts of products creep into the market anyway.
Go to the Sesame website
Read a report on Sesame from The Verge
Like it? Hate it? Don’t trust it? All comments welcome in the section below.
The biggest problem this technology faces is convincing the general public that their home will be secure using it, hard enough to do with plain old multipoint, cylinders & keys, let alone without mentioning mind bending encryption methods coupled with the use of a mobile app. As I said in my tweet earlier today and as I have also mentioned before, I have been toying with designing both the software and hardware for such a system. My current parts list costing using Bluetooth is ~$140 using off the shelf parts and modified accordingly (discounting for time required for mobile app… Read more »
Concerning the compatibility of the system with our euro cylinder locks I imagine this would work with a thumb-turn cylinder?? I quite like it if it works as a fail-safe if one loses their key. But then why not go for the Yale key-free as this gives the same features with 3-star security :S Obviously more expensive though.