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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Watch a Homemade Robot Crack a Safe in Just 15 Minutes

• https://www.wired.com

Last Christmas, Nathan Seidle's wife gave him a second-hand safe she'd found on Craigslist. It was, at first glance, a strange gift. The couple already owned the same model, a $120 SentrySafe combination fire safe they'd bought from Home Depot. But this one, his wife explained, had a particular feature: The original owner had locked it and forgotten the combination. Her challenge to Seidle: Open it.

Seidle isn't much of a safecracker. But as the founder of the Niwot, Colorado-based company SparkFun, a DIY and open-source hardware supplier, he's a pretty experienced builder of homemade gadgets, tools, and robots. So over the next four months, he and his SparkFun colleagues set about building a bot that could crack the safe for them. The result: A fully automated device, built from off-the-shelf and 3-D printed components, that can open his model of SentrySafe in a maximum of 73 minutes, or half that time on average, with no human interaction. In fact, in the demonstration Seidle gave WIRED in the video above, the process took just 15 minutes.

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