"This is the lockpicking robot, and what I have for you today is..."

Lockpicking lawyer getting automated

Painfully overengineered. I like it.

"Yo dude I forgot my key, what do I do?" "Hold on..." *Whipes out Lock Pickenator 9000*

The algorithm has decided this video is gonna make it.

Also consider adding rotational compliance between actuator and key. Measuring amount rotated will measure torque. Much more realistic than having encoder inside the door, plus it will reduce fatigue on the keys.

Lockpicking lawyer laughing from a dark corner menacingly.😂

Once you have a part finalized, like that resin keyblade, send it to a company, like shapeways, to have it metal SLSed or whatever, for full strength

You don't need to have the whole key being metal, if you have pins on the top and bottom to apply the tension the thin plastic won't have to bear the load.

i mean ... this IS a pick. thats a beautiful project.

underrated youtuber

OMG... I drew this up about 1983!!! Of course they say that if you think of anything, a thousand others are thinking the same thing. The difference is, YOU built it! So kudos. Mine was used the same principle, but differed in a couple of details: I drew it with flat wires, which could then "stack" in the key blank, and turn upward to the pins in flat slots. And rather than solenoids, I designed mine with an eccentric cam for each wire... the five or six of which would be in a rotating drum, geared together to quickly go through all possible height combos for the lock... I mean, as you rotated the drum with a crank, the individual cams would also rotate inside, but each one at a slightly different rate, through gearing. Tens of thousands of combinations, I thought, could be gone through in minutes. I also drew it so that different blanks could be attached to the drum, for different locks.

This is the type of account, that is keeping KZfaq from becoming a social media cesspool. phenomenal work!!

As a trained designer/engineer and now current locksmith. I had a similar idea when I first started. This is far more impressive and way wayyyyy cooler than mine. Your editing and video/graphic presentation in your work is remarkable! I will be using your provided files to add to my daily arsenal of bypass tools. Subscribed for sure!

The thing about this type of attack is that it's the only one that _should_ work if your lock is designed properly. Normal lock picking only works because, in the real world, tight tolerances are really hard to achieve. This type of attack isn't much of a concern; if your lock takes hours to open, it'll hold up to attack far longer than your hinges, your windows, or the security measures on the neighbor's house.

jesus, such an inefficient design process

The sheer amount of dedication necessary to make this project work is absolutely adorable. The idea seems simple, but there are so many possible failure points in all the details.

How do you not have a million subscribers?! This is awesome!

Just finished the vid and when I subscribed I noticed u have less than 2k subs?!??! I was expecting 100s of thousands. Let's get this man to 10k guys 💪

This is the Lock Picking Engineer, so this video pushed all of my buttons. That was a monumental work of the art of engineering. I've never seen such dedication in a droid before. The slightly easier version is an automated cylinder lock pick, where straight pins could be used instead of curved wires. It looks like you were using a binary counter to set pin heights. Maybe try Gray code to minimize pin movement. You should also be able to reduce the combinations by eliminating large differences between adjacent pin heights which wouldn't be possible when pushing a key into a lock. I loved your Dunning-Kruger graph. 🙂 The entire video was very well done with excellent graphics.

I thought for quite a while about making a "Sputnik" from 3D printed parts. So this is very interesting to me. I predict this video will gain a lot of traction. Oh, and thank you for publishing the STL and Fusion files.

interesting! if i can throw my unwanted suggestions in: the force behind those wires seems excessive, smaller and weaker linear motors should be sufficient, if all you need is speed and accuracy - another comment mentioned ones from cd drives if you want to turn the key without ruining it, how about an inbuilt tensioning tool? you can turn a springy tensioning tool and measure how far it rotated by the force on the spring, this way you can have some sort of "pick-gun" where you could use it (albeit securely mounted) on an actual in-use lock

Pretty interesting. 1st of all, the metal key is absolutely necessary. Even aluminum ones can get twisted, and you are trying resin/plastic... 2nd of all, you can try to use a base-whatever Gray code, to reduce the number of moved pins.

Wow! Amazing video … not sure what impressed me the most, the explainer animations, the amount of skill this required, or your leet keyboarding chops when you CAD!

I am soo happy you didn’t give up especially when you wanted to Thank you

Dude's killin' it and only 1k subs? Shows you how messed up the algo is... Congrats on your triumph fellow maker!

And then one night, I find the pre science-future invention that vindicates the sci-fi concept of an auto-pick. Brilliant man.

can't believe he put over a year of his life into one 16 minute video.

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.

Amazing video. Superb graphics and production, love your story telling and inclusion of faults and fixes, Thankyou. You’ve gained a sub :-)

Amazing work. I can't imagine the amount of suffer you have had to endure for it. Well done for pushing through.

Applause! Great execution! I've pondered this idea, but with the idea of reading/charting the vibration of the pins being moved. To ideally identify the bumps of the sheer lines. Be it a force sensor on the wire, or just a sensitive microphone against the core. At least to narrow down positions.

Nice work! I feel like not many people understand just how many long, late hours people have to put in to these projects! I'm glad this was on my recommended. Keep up the great work. Also, the animations look very dope!

This is cool to see. 21 weeks ago, apparently, I commented to a friend on FB "Now I want to build a key with tiny flutes running through it, and spring wires hooked to geared stepper motors, and then a robot can just quickly run through the 150k combos for me," because I have a cabinet with a very good lock I cannot for the life of me pick. I actually seriously considered doing this exact project˘which is a lie; I did crazy projects when I was 23, but now I'm twice that, and don't have the same drive to dive into endless efforts like this). I also actually considered printing every possible key, but I don't know which key yet, and yeah, those combinatorics... I figured I could fit 50 keys on the plate per print, 4 hours, 15 minutes per print, using 82g of PLA, and I'd need 117,649 keys, so only 2,353 full-plate prints, taking almost exactly 10k hours (10000.165!). I'd also need 192,864g of filament, which is only 193 reels, so about $2600 with ANYCUBIC 4-packs ($13/reel). I figured I'd only need to do about 1500 runs before I landed on the key, so about 6,375 hours, or 797 8-hour printing shifts. Not too bad :)

This is really cool! If you don't mind my asking, did you ever consider making and testing your prototypes with less pins in the lock? the mechanism is essentially identical for each wire, so once you knew you could fit five wires into a key mould and manipulate them by hand you could've scaled back significantly and saved a lot of money and time by making one or two of the mechanism and testing that.

Kind of reminds me of the "key impressioning" technique in which you insert a key blank into a lock, wiggle it, see where the pins left a mark on the blank and file those places 1 step down. Rinse repeat until you got a complete key. But to automate that it would require some sort of measuring capability other comments already mentioned and which is probably quite hard/impossible to achieve.

this thing looks like some NASA thruster or something with all the actuators converging to one point. Wild! Awesome project! I can imagine how fiddly and painful getting this to work must have been. Take your well deserved break!

As a fellow lock picker, i think this is bloody awesome!! You definitely have my subscription

. . . sometimes it is easy to build upon the hard work of a pioneer, once someone takes the initial step, it is easy for the rest of us to step in and make improvements, thank you sir for creating the initial design

I am just watching this to get rid of it from being suggested down my throat all the time

This is so cool, I've had this idea in my head for a while but never had the skills to actually make it. Awesome to see somebody else thought the same way and actually went through the effort, and made a dope video out of it too.

Fun project, some very nice engineering. One little remark: When using a setscrew to fix a gear (or pulley, for that matter) onto a shaft, the setscrew should be on the opposite side of the flat (the round part of the shaft), in effect pushing the flat parts together. The setscrew isn't there to prevent rotation, it's there to ensure close fitment of the flat faces to transmit torque across the parts.

Wow... the amount of effort is incredible... good job!

You are simply my hero!! The frustration you had at every obstacle was palpable and I know how that is with any project. But how you persevered and moved forward... is sadly something I am working on! What a cool project!

I love the choice of music in this, very suspenseful.

So this is stuffmadehere with the voice of Jeremy fielding.

Ridiculously cool. But absolutely impractical

Oh man, you've got some great design skills! We live in a fantastic time where 3D printing and electronics availability allow smart creators to do stuff like this. Keep it up, I'm subscribing!

I had to rewind a couple times to see if it actually worked. Maybe you could make it more apparent, for example: have the monitor in view showing different combinations and a success result. Would be great to have as the format of your story telling builds up to the climax, and then... "wait, what happened?" Felt like the payoff wasn't there for us as viewers. Anyway, glad I found your channel, subscribed! Looking forward to more!

Aside from your exceptional mechanical AND video editing skills, what’s really cool about these videos, is the way that other people “collectively collaborate and contribute” their ideas to either enhance, or further your original project and ideas!

This is awesome! I had thought about something very similar to this, but hadnt had a way to try to make it. Just a thought though, had you considered using some sort of metal insert into your key blade to make it more robust? We lockpickers use windshield wiper blade inserts a lot for various tools including tensioners, maybe having one of the really thin ones at the top in the plastic or the bottom edge would help?

The manual version you made first has some serious potential. With metal construction that would sell like hot cakes

I'm very picky about what KZfaq videos I watch and this one was great.

That's awesome! I invite you to look into using pulse generators to speed up the stepper motors, using smaller gear cogs and more gears for additional accuracy and torque, and using impregnated resin. But I'm nobody, just an armchair coach who has never played the game. Love to watch! 👍

Incredible video! Building that robot was impressive on many levels, even if it only worked for bruteforcing. I think to detect, when a pin sets, you would need to make it out of metal to minimize the flexing. Maybe even add an acoustic sensor. Excited for version 3. I hope you get the views you deserve!

Nice work! I considered making a picking tool years ago based on the same principles as yours but I never got around to doing it. I was trying to do something the size of a cordless screwdriver using one motor to sequentially nudge the wires - almost like an automated rake that moved the pins directly just like yours. I'm impressed that you did it. I gave up because I couldn't make it portable. If you record the pin heights, you'll have a lock key decoder, sorts like like a lichee pick, but automated.

This is mind blowing. I love picking locks. I think this is so cool

MT6701 or AS5600 are great magnetic encoders and can be mounted directly to the back of the stepper with the magnet on the shaft. Great project!

Underrated channel. Subbed&liked.

How do you not have a hundred times as many subscribers, at least? Your production is solid, and your project is interesting! There is the problem of this not being able to pick a lock in situ, but I imagine that this is what version 3 is for.

Awesome work dude. Can't wait to see your next project 👏

Great video. Taking a break is a great idea. Your focus will be much better when you return. Thanks for sharing your journey. Don't give up. I'm looking forward to the next chapter when you return.

You could write an algorithm that pushes each wire in as far as it will go, measures how far in each one goes, and then use those differences to calculate where each pin should line up. Then send those possibilities and you'll be in in a few orders of magnitude quicker.

Nice take 😄. Have you thougth about using "Gray code" to improve the search speed (at least a little). This might be considered "premature optimisation" but if you are familiar with Gray codes the required implementation time, effort and number of lines of code to change should be rather insignificant.

Bro about to blow up with this video. Great work on this project. Looking at the pretty large requirements for motors here, I feel like there has to be a way to reduce that number - perhaps you could have the large motor turn a driveshaft, and then a series of simple geared connections that tap power from that drive shaft using a servo or maybe even a solenoid to engage/disengage a clutch? There are also closed loop steppers so you could have the software read back the position of the large rotation, combined with your original load cell design you might be able to sense each sequential pin as well as evaluate false sets - Instead of trying 00001, 00002 - 99998, 99999, you'd test all pin 1 positions, record maximum tumbler deflection for a given force (or record a curve or position:force), reset p1 to 0 and then test all pin 2 positions - slowly build a "best guess". If that guess is say, 55555 - back to brute force but all combos within 1 or 2 of that baseline (testing 1 step would be 44444 to 66666), reduces your tests from 10⁵ to somewhere between 3⁵ (1 step) and 5⁵ (2 steps). Depending on how accurate of a closed stepper and load cell you get... I bet this accuracy could be brought lower and lower. If you also added another load cell on the wires to "feel" resistance there... Well it isnt going to help complexity but more sensor data will probably help reduce your Nⁿ search even further! 😂 Again, tremendous work, great video - _love_ the editing and visuals youve put together. Toss in an explosion and you're rivalling early Mythbusters production quality. Looking forward to seeing you grow!

I’m massively into engineering and science and KZfaqs algorithm suggested this video, so you’re doing something right 😂. Keep up the good work, you’ll get there, pick that damn lock! Subscribed! 👍🏻

Picking the right resin will impact the brittleness a lot, especially water washable. Also make sure the resin isn’t too cold, the bottle will give you the recommended temps.

alright now I'm off to designing the most eldritch horror of a keyway

Absolutely respect the hustle, what a huge project for a relatively small KZfaq channel, I couldn't presently dare the volume of effort you have gone into and quality of video! great work bud, enjoying the watch! (at the time of this comment you had 3.27K subs, keen to see the growth!)

great prototype, i can see this becoming a real tool

For a future version, instead of using an optical encoder you can measure the current needed to turn the motor that's rotating the key. Sorta how modern 3d printers do nozzle bed leveling, you would do a few light turns before starting to get a base line of a locked state and then do a momentary test every time you get a wire into a new location.

FYI, your "key" breaking issue looks to be because of stress risers from a square interface with the main circular hub/part (see <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="229">3:49</a>) since they all appear to break at almost exactly the same spot. If you add a small fillet, even a tiny one, its strength will increase significantly.

immediately subscribed! What an incredible idea and project!

Fantastic creativity and inventiveness on show here. Can't wait to see more.

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...

Just had this video come across my KZfaq feed. First of yours I've seen and I instantly subbed at your first "daggumit" I'm instantly attracted to this kind of content. Throw on top the Southern accent. I'm sold.

I think you can get your key reprinted in metal from one of those services. then you can switch back to the load cell. awesome work

Pretty awesome build. I'd love to see a more optimised version with much smaller/faster motors. That manual pick is pretty incredible too.

what a cool video! wish you the best of luck with version 3 ;)

Amazing typing simulation. It was like I was watching you work!

This is awesome, it reminds me a lot of the lock picking device "sputnik", except automated.

it would be fun to see lockpicking lawyer try the manual version

Great project vlog! I do wonder how much pain you would have spared yourself if you had decided to try some different resins early on. The fast resins tend to be very brittle, but a lot of functional resins behave more like ABS. There might also be some room for a hybrid design, where you print the fine details but attach those to a metal key base somehow; the load-bearing part isn't the same as the fine-detail part...

More modern stepper drivers such as the TMC2209, are capable of measuring resistance on the stepper motor, which would be useful for sensing if the lock has been picked or not, the force is set in firmware/software(depends on how you want to implement it), so you can easily tune the force to be just right where it will be able to turn the key once unlocked but won't be able to shear the plastic key.

What a great project! For version 3 you could create a hole for a keyring

Fantastic. Next step: rotary force sensors, external instead of integrated, and all keyways support.

NGL... first thing I pictured when I read the title was OG Robocop punching through a wall to apprehend a bad guy on the other side...

coming for Lock picking lawyer. you should send him one

McNally needs to see this

I really liked that manual one. Oddly, I considered something like this before. Good on your for actually building it. I also didn’t have a way to manufacture anything.

As a retired locksmith I find this fascinating, though I question the reasoning behind the venture, anyone who has trained or even amateur pickers would have much faster success, putting the optical encoder to the rear of the lock would negate any real world use, I personally wouldn’t have used so many motors and worked on something that the actuator choose which pin to move and put an initial tension on the lock as in conventional picking, the part about security pins being negated is a mute point, a good picker can tell if there’s a security pin and know how to get past it, this can be taught and if people can learn so can computers. 😊 feel free to hit me up once you recover 🤯 if you want to brainstorm 😊

This is INSANITY! Great work!

Dude, this is freaking awesome. Love to see the dedication and creativity. Sub

Question: since the lock is now integrated in the middle, the robot is limited to locks removed from their door. If you could get all the components on one side, it could actually open locked doors. You could still use an optical encoder, but you need a secondary signal to compare against. You need a way to compare the key blade rotation to the system rotation. So essentially 2 sensors.

If you use Nitinol memory wires you can control them like little motors using simple electrical signals. We are working on a skin tight exoskeleton that has thousands of thin .5mm Nitinol memory wires running through the entire suit with pickup along all major muscle groups to fire the wires when needed. In short if you go to lift something very heavy, simply try to lift it and once your muscle groups in your arm slightly tighten the pickups read the electrical signal through your skin and tell a micro controller to fire the corresponding Nitinol memory wires thus greatly assisting the weight your lifting. I should mention Nitinol is made from titanium and nickel so its super strong!

Hey, here some ideas to upgrade your prototype: First you diminuate the size and the velocity of your prototype by using, instead of linear actuators enrol the cable around cylinder with a huge diameter or use between the enrollment cylinder and the motor reductions gears. Moreover for the rotation you use a stepper motor, witch you can already use the position as an actuator. Lastly it could be great to have a version that can fit to a door and stay in place To conclude its a really good job you won +1 subscription

A great improvement for the manual version would be to slim it down to something not as bulky or long. Something you could easily store in a small kit bag or pocket. Remember those pens where you could choose from all sorts of colors? Something like that with some markings for wire depth and pin number would be great.

I'm going to contest your encoder simply because you put it on the other side of the lock. If anything, you need some form of force feedback to determine whether that cylinder is free or not. Simple load cell on a spiral spring would do the job. In fact a load cell can determine when each pin has cleared as well

Awesome. I had exactly the same idea for this design (with wires) some years ago, not as a robot but as a manual tool where each wire could be adjusted by knobs or sliders. Unfortunately, I lacked the means/tools to put this idea into a prototype.

Nice try, and an interesting approach. Thanks! 🙂👍 In reality, those Sparrows(?) practice locks can sometimes be opened by using a rake in a couple of seconds. And a fairly low cost electric picking gun (EPG) can be very quick on real door locks. It will be very interesting to see a version of this machine opening a standard 6 pin tumbler lock with security pins with the lock fitted into a door.