Slashdot Mirror
Cart Locking System Released as Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "You may have noticed that over the past few years it has become increasingly common to find supermarket and large retail store shopping carts equipped with 'boots' designed to lock up if you try to take the cart outside of the store. Now, someone has discovered through some clever analysis the signal used to both lock and unlock carts, and has designed a portable system that locks up all carts within 20 feet of the emitter! They have released the schematics, software, and detailed instructions for assembling the systems on Instructables, an online magazine dedicated to releasing howto's for everything from rat taxidermy to Shopping Cart EMPs under a Creative Commons License."
Just what I need... some snot-nosed kid locking up all the carriages in the parking lot.
a fair amount of mischief about.....or maybe it's just cowboyneal.
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
... like a lot more fun than an iPhone. Plus it doesn't require a 2 year AT&T commitment ;-)
Is it really a good idea to show all pranksters in the world how to lock up a bunch of innocent people's carts in a store?
I'd much prefer if supermarket pranksters stuck to less annoying pranks, like hiding a speakerphone and ketchup bags in a baby-less baby-holder, having it play "crying" sounds, and then publicly "beating" the "baby" until it "bleeds".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Why not have all the carts locked up when someone takes a cart outside the zone and have an alarm goes off on the offending cart. That way the perp can be lynched by the shopping mob before the carts unlocked. That should reduce the number of incidents.
First Lock!
FreeBSD: Because Computers Can Be Fun... Again.
will be of great interest to a certain inhabitant of the Sunnyvale trailer park.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
we have shopping carts that are all chained together...you insert a one euro coin to remove it and then take the cart back to the cart corral to retrieve your coin....it seems to work fairly well here.
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
As if millions of homeless suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. ;-)
Creative Commons is not Open Source. Creative Commons is not Open Source. Creative Commons is not Open Source.
Now if only somebody could figure out a way to do this to automobiles remotely...oh the fun!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Open Source it is not.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This 4th of July when both me & my neighbor get our lazy asses to the grocery store to get cookout supplies at the last minute, I will laugh evily when he flies over the handlebars & lands in his basket when we're both 10 feet away from the last case of beer.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Fun with supermarkets and security strips:
1. If you're in the UK and you've bought region 1 DVDs, look inside the case and you'll most likely find one of those long thin security tags.
2. Peel off one of those security tags and stick it the underside of a shopping trolley.
3. Sit back and wait for some unsuspecting shopper to trigger the alarm, when going in nobody will really bat an eyelid, but if they walk out with a trolley load of shopping and it goes off, things will get interesting.
4. Tag as many shopping trolleys as you can for maximum fun.
5. ????
6. Profit!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Reminds me somewhat of this quote from bash.org- cag URL tara: When I was in high school, the school board decided that the biology students had to pay for the fetal pigs that were being dissected. After the course was done, my friend Amy demanded that she be allowed to take the pig, since she had paid for it. There was some WTF from the school, but she got her pig. That weekend, she and her brother dressed the pig up in some baby clothes and a blanket, drove down the street and lit a smoke bomb in the car. They were passing a couple walking down the street when Amy leaned out of the car and yelled "Save my baby" and tossed the pig at the couple. They were doing about 50 mph so she missed the couple. The baby/pig hit the sidewalk, skidded along the concrete, shedding parts and limbs before it impacted a mailbox.
She said she had never seen such a horrified look in her life. I mean, yeah, it's funny, and I hate to say that I laughed at it a lot (and still keep doing so whenever I read it), but at the same time I'm thinking that they should have been locked up for doing something that would have been quite the opposite of funny- if not downright traumatic- for the pedestrians.
finally i can shop without worrying about rogue carts hitting my car
It's bad enough your computer could lock up. Now your shopping cart? How exciting will this be?
I can already see the law&order freaks to demand something like that in every car so the cops needn't pull you over but can simply stop you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. nerdy does not imply not-asshole
2. this was not actually designed by a competent engineer. a competent engineer would have put the transmit coil in an lc circuit tuned to the right frequency and thus made it way more powerful while consuming way less electricity. this is essentially an electric heater that radiates a small magnetic field.
I've never seen one of these in use on the west coast of the US. Sounds kind of strange - why shouldn't you be able to take a shopping cart outside? Do you just have to eat all your groceries at the store, or only buy as much as you can carry at one time?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
This is obviously a blatant violation of the DMCA provisions against reverse engineering a property protection scheme.
We didn't need some fancy electronic locking device to stop trolleys leaving the car park (translation to American: carts leaving the parking lot)
..
Instead each trolley stacked up in the waiting area had a small mechanical lock that attached a pin to the trolley in front by a chain. In order to release the next trolley in line you had to insert a $1 coin, which was retained in the lock. When you finished using your trolley, you locked it back up again and your coin was returned. No high faluting electronics, a built in incentive to return the trolley, and no mysterious lockups.
Of course trolley wheels have been designed since day one to lock up without any fancy electronics inside them
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...a new gadget for sale at ThinkGeek in the forseeable future? :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My local supermarket has gone extremely low-tech with trying to stop the casual trolley thief (ie chav scum kids), one of the wheels of each trolley has a magnetic triggered brake and the pedestrian entrances to the grounds have a bunch of magnets embedded into the concrete.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
That exists in some new cars already, remote engine stop. They can lock (they advertise "unlock") the doors on you for that matter.
From a quick scan of the site, it looks like ths is the most intelligent thing on the entire place. Other projects include "Boobs in a Box," and a straight hookup of a piezo-electric buzzer called "The Headache Machine" with some retard commenting in bad English that it seems "really hard to make."
WTF! Over 20 parts and hours of work to do *this*? All you need is a recording of the tones and $34 car CD player. No programming, soldering, or microcomputers required.
Oh, funny isnt it?
Why people try to do every thing by Tech? Why not some other way that proven effective?
Ethic, Law?
Are people lost faith with them? Or thec make them dead stuipd?
WTF! Over 20 parts and hours of work to do *this*? All you need is a recording of the tones and $34 car CD player. No programming, soldering, or microcomputers required.
I was thinking even more descreet. A car CD player is a little strange to be carrying about with a battery. A better deal would be an I-pod with an amplified speaker amplifier with a tuned coil. The tuned coil will cut the power requirement greatly. The mp3 player is deniable as a hack device. The amp is for speakers, Duh, and the loop is an am radio antenna. Most non technical security folks won't be able to see it for what it is.
Building a loop on the end of a walking cane could prove fun.
When you return your cart in the parking lot, drop an item and have it roll under the carts. Use your cane to retrieve it. Wait for them to pick up the row of carts to return them to the store entrance...
The truth shall set you free!
I think a better target would be the vibrating coasters that signal "your table is ready". If you could somehow set up all of those to go off at the same time on a Friday night you might...have them all going off at the same time on a Friday night! Drive-by mayhem!
hilarious
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Senseless vandalism. Swell. How laudable. Life is tough enough, but how about locking up some wage-earner's cart, after he has suffered under the hands of a sadistic boss, just wanting to get some grub and go home. Delightful.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Just how many non-commercial uses are there for cart locking systems, anyhow?
can the cost of putting a remote control boot, sensors, transmitters etc. really cheaper than losing some carts?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The majority of the links on the site (pictures, etc.) are now coming up "Unavailable" or 404 errors. It's lying to us... apparently it doesn't know how to say "I can't take it anymore!!!"
Willie...
Just give Bubbles some money to build the device and he'll be selling them back to his heart's content.
Unless Ricky goes and fucks it up as usual. That dumb bastard.
"can the cost of putting a remote control boot, sensors, transmitters etc. really cheaper than losing some carts?" Obviously, yes, that is why stores pay big bucks for these systems. Remember, they don't just lose a few carts, they lose all of them one at a time. They have to hire people to cruz neighborhoods looking for them and bring them back. Those they do find are often worse for the wear. Ones they don't find wind up rusting in creeks and abandoned, broken in alleys and fallow yards. Locking shopping carts help prevent neighborhoods from being littered with these abandoned carts brought home on one-way trips by people who can't be bothered to buy a "granny cart." The addition of locks to my local shopping center's carts has quickly eliminated those carts from being strewn about by people walking home with groceries. The newer systems are much better than earlier iterations that use purely mechanical devices triggered by small "speed bump" like berms which rimmed the parking lot. These new systems are more reliable and have fewer false triggers--well, until now :-)
Note, I support walking to the store but I don't support stealing the cart just because it is convenient to push home--and no, most of those people pushing carts home are not fragile elderly people, at least not in my area, so that isn't the issue. And no, nobody ever takes them back, either. If they did, it wouldn't be as big a deal.
This ain't rocket science. You don't need a CPU to do this, let alone a PCB board. Doesn't anybody know how to build stuff using discrete logic anymore? Eesh. I could have built this on a perfboard when I was 15.
When all else fails, run.
The system works by using E&M waves near the frequency of sound, not sound waves. So an audio version of the signal will not do anything. Sound and Radio waves are different.
And all the bread and toilet paper is MINE! ALL MINE!!!
MUAHaHahahahah!!
(Gotta credit my wife with this one - she's truly evil)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Aldi's uses a "deposit" with their carts, you put a quarter in to unlock it from the rack and get the quarter back when you return the cart. The parking lots I have seen are always clear of carts, it seems like a cost effective way to manage them, its a simple mechanical lock.
I guess something like this would be needed in area's where homeless take carts on regular basis but then arent we just treating side effects rather than addressing the actual problem?
Why didn't they just build the device to always lock when there's no signal? A transmitter in the store emits a continuous signal that keeps the wheels unlocked. When you take it out of the parking lot and go out of signal range, the wheels lock up.
Seems a bit more prank proof that way.
Camping on quad since 1996.
an UN-locker, so that when I'm parked at the edge of the damned lot and the cart freezes up 20' from said edge where transmitter is, I don't have to shuttle the bags from the stuck cart to my car while blocking traffic and having a cart that I can't reasonably get back into a cart-pen?
Just a thought. I HATE these things.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I have made it work with an mp3 player and a coil of wire on a ferrous core. The range is no where near theirs, but its easy and it works. http://www.instructables.com/id/ENSDA1VF3KLNVD9/
It really is a big problem for surrounding neighborhoods, like you said. There's a low-rent highrise apt bldg near a grocery store in my area that was fined by the Fire Dept a few years ago because there were so many abandoned grocery carts clogging up the hallways. Just another example of reality being weirder than fiction!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
The carts are part of the culture.
The system is grossly skewed towards the interest of the cart-owners, who abuse their control over the implements.
We have the right to take the carts away for our convenience (fair use) — and it is not "stealing", because we always plan to bring them back some day. It is stupid and unethical for the supermarkets to fight their customers over this, especially the single mothers (who have never gone shopping) among them.
SMAA (SuperMarket Association of America) and similar oppressive institutions world-wide will, no doubt, try to suppress this new invention, so all freedom-fighters must start mirroring the just released information on their computers.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The owners of the shopping carts install these devices to keep the buggies from leaving the store or parking lot. This method of clamping the wheels is a negative approach; punishing those who stray with the carts. A more positive system is used in The Netherlands. Shoppers in Dutch supermarkets must insert a quarter in to the cart lock to release it from the cluster of other carts. If they want their quarter back, then they must return the cart to the cart rack. Sure, some may scoff at the quarter, but the procedure seems to work in Holland; citizens dutifully return the carts to the store after use. Maybe in the States, a dollar coin could be used as enticement. Perhaps dangling a carrot (money) in front of patrons is better then beating them with a stick (wheel clamp).
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Unfortunately I cant think of a good source for active ones inside the store without ripping open DVDs or something. I work in the photo dept and when i put new models on the camera bar, the security strip is frequently loose inside the battery dept. I always take it out, peel off the backing and stick it on the bottom of a cart. Probably a good dozen carts have em now, its always funny to see a stockman bring in a long train of carts and set off the alarm. Its great because theres no way to deactivate them without running them over the registers and nobody has the time to search the underside of all the carts or test them in the alarm one by one.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Sounds cheaper to domesticate humans properly in the first place.
It's a shopping cart. Do you expect a cryptographic handshake on the security system?
A more serious low-end security problem is dumb garage door opener systems. Too many of those can be opened by cycling through all the codes quickly.
This can be really dangerous if a child is in the shopping cart, it's in a parking lot, and the cart is being pushed across a lane of traffic with approaching traffic when the cart pusher thought there was plenty of time to get across.
"My wheels! I can't move my wheels!"
If they really thought about it, I suppose it's some kind of audio-vibratory-physio-molecular transport device?
Urban Sprinting
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Am I the first person who has never even heard of this "shopping cart locking" technology? This is gonna piss off a lot of bums in my city... OTOH this technology in the hands of teens could completely redefine wal*mart pranks
Maybe true: no 2 year committment to ATT, but perhaps a 1 year committment in the local state penitentiary :-). Well, this is probably better than to be with ATT, so GO FOR IT!
Either way, you're going to get fucked.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
it would have been useful to have this a while back when the elevator broke down at a grocery store (safeway) I was at- in order to get to my car I was instructed to take the cart around front when the wheels locked up. There were too many groceries to carry by hand and employees wouldn't help so I was forced to drag the cart around and up a hill which ended up laying out my back. I had to the doctor and was on medications for weeks afterwards (relaxers, anti inflammitories and pain killers. If I would have had an unlocker I could have just unlocked it and saved myself the pain.
Here's some carts ready to try it on.
(safe for most workplaces)
I don't know about anywhere else, but our local supermarket has something like this already. Soon as you take it past the yellow line painted around the car park the wheels lock up....
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
That is the real issue. That there are people out there willing to wreck havoc with trolleys (or carts).
And in a typical fashion shops go for the apparently cheaper option: tech instead of social. It is cheaper in the long term to put en electronic break than to have 2 guards at all times in the parking lot.
The guards would send a strong social message: this is private property, no pranks here.
The fancy electronic devices say: we don't care, if you can get away with it all the power to you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And not all require gadgetry.
If people are taking the carts, there is a fucking business model screaming at the shops right there. So put 2 guards in the parking lot to make sure nobody takes the trolleys and request a deposit from anybody taking it home, big enough to want people to bring them back, but low enough not to deter people from using the service.
On return of the trolley refund most of the money and keep a small fee.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
we have hot geek girl acquired... sadly with face out of shot we cannot determine just HOW hot...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Slashdot is the ideal place to find snot nosed kids will EE degrees.
Terrorist scould use this system to cause havoc. Just imagine if they set one of these devices off at a supermarket and then everyone's trolley would stop. The devestation would be horrific as people get hit in the stomach by their trolley handles. Some people might even end up with nasty bruises! Not only that, but they could steal the trolleys and make someof the wheels even more wobbly than usual.
Terror weapons like this should be bannned before its to late.
All your cart are belong to us!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
CS students of VUB University of Brussels did this same thing some years ago for the shopping carts in the local Colruyt shop. AFAIK it was also released in the wild.
I left out the bit about using a coil of wire instead of a speaker. I just assumed all SD readers could figure that out.
the coin to unlock the cart from the one in front of it at the 'cart queue'
and
the lock on the wheel if you try and take it outside of a particular perimeter.
the first is, as somebody else said, to encourage you to bring the darn thing back to a queue. It saves them work and every other shopper a stray cart. You, in return, get your coin / keyring token back. It never picked up much in the U.S. because everybody there is so accustomed to service. Your groceries get bagged -for- you. They get brought to your car -for- you. If you leave a stray cart.. no problem, some poor $3/hour sap will return it -for- you. Not saying that the service is a bad thing... hey, it employs another few kids, and still your products are cheaper than in the EU, so it can't be all bad. But I find not returning a shopping cart to be little above the level of people leaving their junk at a theatre because somebody else will come along and clean it up for you anyway. What's wrong with you that you find that enough reason to -not- just take your trash with you and drop it in the next bin along your way (of which there are plenty in a theatre). Anyway, I'll stop ranting and move on with...
The latter is purely to help prevent theft. And yes, carts cost a shitload to make - you'd think that just being bits of metal wire or even cast plastic they'd be as cheap as the next childrens' toy. Nuh-uh. They go well over a hundred euros. It's insane.
As for the story.. yay, another prankster.. ha ha. *yawn*
The ASDA brand of super markets (Walmart owned) has had these for ages at the end of the walkways & store carparks.
:D
It's amazing how many older people I've seen caught out by this because they need assistance to get their shopping to their car or to the bus. A few times I've seen ASDA attendants dragging the locked trolley for them instead of waiting 5 minutes to get somewbody out to unlock it.
In theory it works, in practice people just carry the trolley over fences to stop it being locked up while people with disabilities or frail people end up being given a hard time.
It's like DRM but for shopping trolleys
I use the shopping baskets provided...
I needed a good laugh this morning, and by golly that was it!
My brother and I used to go fossil hunting in a local creekbed. One weekend we counted no fewer than 14 shopping carts spread over half a mile of creek, most buried deeply in the gravel and mud. They were all from the same grocery store, in a middle- to low-income neighborhood. An employee of that store told me the carts cost $400 each to replace.
What a great way to spread the message of Open Source. Terrorism.
It's got two additional bonuses:
* You don't get carts left between cars and loose in the parking lot.
* You get neighborhood kids corralling the few carts that do stray and bringing them back for the quarters.
We've had them for years in Canada, stick a quarter in the slot and release the cart. Bring the cart back and get your quarter back. Very few carts ever go missing or leave the store property. I don't know why it's not like that in the States.
On one hand, I don't think things like this should be censored, it's a pretty cool even though it's sole purpose is to annoy a bunch of strangers.
My real concern is not even so much that someone would get hurt from a cart stopping abruptly (though that could certainly happen), is more what would happen if someone notices someone with an electrical device strapped to their body. That could end badly, seems far fetched but in a day and age where an LED Mooninite sign can trigger city wide panic, not hard to imagine someone getting popped for what looks like an IED.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
"Juuulian! What the fack is up with these shopping carts? They got little facking clampers on 'em and the fackin' wheels don't work!"
God, I love that show. And God bless Bittorrent, or I'd never have seen anything but a single season of it, censored, on BBC America.
Congratulations, Orthonormal. I am the engineer who designed the CAPS electronics ten years ago. You have "broken into" a really simple, completely unsecured system.
Please leave the carts unlocked when you are done playing. If you screw them up, you are stealing from stores that don't make much of a profit margin. And from the company (actual human beings) that did something about carts being left all over neighborhoods. They don't make much money, either. Retrieving carts turns out to be a significant expense for stores. There are companies that charge money to pick them up (Which always seemed like a potential protection racket to me.)
If that's you modeling the system in the instructables article, I'm in love. Brains and beauty.
As far as "On the one hand, we feel sorry for the engineer who has to figure out why thunderstorms are setting off a byte-encoded trigger for the locking mechanism. On the other hand, HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Sorry, but I had to tell Carttronics LLC about your prank.
The fact that I actually find this funny reassures me that I'm not getting too old just yet.