Forgetting house keys indoors, losing them outside, breaking the house lock, burglary – all these are very common avoidable incidents everyone faces. To avoid such situations, a French company GEMECOD presented their new product IKILOCK, which unlocks the doors with the help of the smartphones without the hassles of the keys. This French product, not only unlocks your door keys, but also unlocks the main gate in case you live in an apartment. This product also features ‘virtual keys’ which can be shared by other family members or guests so that there wouldn’t be any need of a locksmith.
The best design of the lock was selected after many iterations . According to GEMECOD’s CEO and founder Jacques Leneveu, the development and creation of the final design of the recently unveiled IKILOCK owed much to 3D printing technologies.
“I knew from the beginning that 3D printing was the right technology to produce some of our prototype’s parts,” says Leneveu, who also explains that various types of 3D printing technologies were used in the making of prototypes. The pieces of the lock that did not require a fine finish were additively manufactured using a polyamide plastic material, while finer parts were made on a Polyjet 3D printer out of resin. The metal framework of the lock was prototyped using CNC machining processes.
As Leneveu explains,3D printing played a vital role in determining the best smart lock model and launch it in no time . “I think that using both 3D printing and CNC machining together allowed us to realize the prototypes in a matter of months,” says Leneveu. “In the past, developing a fully functional prototype could take up to a year. When you mention that we did three of them before finding the right form, fit and function factors…it would have taken us ages.”
Fortunately there were only minor changes in the design using the 3D printing software which lead to the rapid prototyping.The final product appeared to be a brushed metal with wooden front as shown in the pictures.
The smart lock consists of 3 components: mainly, IKILOCK , which is fixed on your door and gets controlled by an app; the IKICENTER, a plug-in device that connects your phone to the door’s lock—this is also the component that keeps your lock secure as it stops any direct communication between your lock and the internet; and the IKIPLUG, which unlocks your building’s door by triggering your apartment’s intercom when you order it to.
The IKILOCK is commercially available in European and North american stores. This product can also be purchased online in other countries. As our lives are so connected to the smartphones,it seems inevitable to have a smart lock for this generation. Check the video to know more about IKILOCK.