Seidle, the founder of Niwot, Colorado, received quite the unique Christmas present last year—a vintage fire safe from his wife. However, since it was a second-hand item, the safe had been locked by the previous owner, and the combination had long been forgotten. Determined to crack it open himself, Seidle, who works at SparkFun and has years of experience building gadgets and robots, decided to take on the challenge.
After weeks of brainstorming and experimentation, Seidle and his team managed to build a fully automated robot capable of opening the safe in just 15 minutes. This impressive feat cost them around $200 to construct, including a $20 motherboard, a $40 motor, an aluminum frame, 3D-printed parts, and even a cleverly integrated scale to measure the subtle differences in the dial's grooves. Considering the safe could have up to a million possible combinations (100x100x100), manually trying each one would take nearly four months if done at a rate of one combination every ten seconds.
Initially, Seidle attempted to speed up the process by reducing the time the robot spent on each combination, but this only improved efficiency by about a third. It wasn't until he identified a design flaw in the safe itself that things began to move faster. He noticed that the grooves corresponding to the correct numbers were slightly narrower than the others, a detail invisible to the naked eye. By incorporating a delicate pressure sensor into the robot's mechanism, it could now accurately detect these subtle differences and zero in on the right combination much more quickly.
This breakthrough allowed the robot to open the safe in just 15 minutes, a remarkable improvement over traditional manual methods. Despite their success, Seidle admitted that this particular robot was tailored specifically to this older, less secure safe. Higher-end safes with more advanced locking mechanisms might prove too challenging for the current design. Encouraging others to tinker and improve upon his creation, Seidle expressed hope that robotics enthusiasts would build on his work. "I don’t know if I’ll ever build another one exactly like this," he said, "but I’d love for people to get involved and see what they can do to adapt and enhance what we’ve already created."
The project highlights the power of DIY ingenuity and the potential for robotics to solve everyday problems, even something as mundane as forgotten safe combinations.
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