Cart Locking System Released as Open Source

Posted by Zonk on Sunday July 1, 2007 @11:01AM from the magic-tubes-and-pots-and-pans dept.

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."

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license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike by QuantumG · 2007-07-01 11:21 · Score: 0, Redundant

Open Source it is not.

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How we know is more important than what we know.
Been done before... by Techman83 · 2007-07-01 18:26 · Score: 0, Redundant

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....

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# cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!