True story: I got an old keypad safe from a company I used to work for. Nobody knew the combination or had the backup key, so it was just dead weight. When I got it home, I started running through all the possibilities that I could think of to come up with a device to crack it. Would I use an Arduino? LEGO robot? Manually push buttons until I figured it out?
Nope. I just opened the battery compartment.
Actually, I removed the keypad housing, too. I found a header of some sort that I thought I'd try wiring something up to, until I noticed that there were only two wires going from the inside of the safe to the outside of the safe. "Surely," I thought, "it wouldn't be THAT easy..." I attached the two wires to the positive and negative leads on the battery pack and heard a "click". The safe opened right up!
I thought about doing something "cool" with it like bypass the keypad entirely with a magnetic reed switch and a special ring, but life happened and I never went back to the it. Just goes to show that locks are only there to keep honest people out!
Slashdot Mirror
True story: I got an old keypad safe from a company I used to work for. Nobody knew the combination or had the backup key, so it was just dead weight. When I got it home, I started running through all the possibilities that I could think of to come up with a device to crack it. Would I use an Arduino? LEGO robot? Manually push buttons until I figured it out? Nope. I just opened the battery compartment. Actually, I removed the keypad housing, too. I found a header of some sort that I thought I'd try wiring something up to, until I noticed that there were only two wires going from the inside of the safe to the outside of the safe. "Surely," I thought, "it wouldn't be THAT easy..." I attached the two wires to the positive and negative leads on the battery pack and heard a "click". The safe opened right up! I thought about doing something "cool" with it like bypass the keypad entirely with a magnetic reed switch and a special ring, but life happened and I never went back to the it. Just goes to show that locks are only there to keep honest people out!