With the basics established, and a thriving community of security-aware hackers out there sharing tips (all in the name of hardening security, of course), it was only a matter of time until someone produced a lock-picking robot. And what a robot! This beauty uses a hollow 3D-printed key blade with five wires running through it, which pop out where you’d expect to find the teeth of a regular key. These push the lock’s pins up while another motor rotates the key blade. There are only so many combinations that are possible, and the robot’s software just cycles through all of these combinations in a physical brute-force attack.

We don’t think many readers will want to replicate this machine – the plastic will most probably fail before the robot has cycled through all the possible pin combinations – but there is one aspect of it that we think all robot makers should think about, and that’s the way it controls rotation. To ensure the machine doesn’t try to rotate the machine while the lock is still closed, which would break the key blade, Sparks and Code has used an optical encoder to give feedback to the stepper motor, which will tell it to stop turning if the lock doesn’t move.