Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gonzalohm 26 days ago
Is this something you do often? I could see a few use cases and also for copying garage keys. But I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment
5 comments

> I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment

This is not a rational purchase - most of the rule breaking done with the zero is for fun or convenience, rather than being truly illegal.

It used to be more fun before the hotels started handing out NFC unlocks with your phone.

Still, being able to send each other a key for a hotel room on Signal is a nice trick if you are traveling with a sufficiently tech savvy group of people.

If you just want to clone a typical garage door remote, you're way better off buying a generic $5 fob. Almost all the 433MHz garage fobs I've seen are designed to easily clone each other. And if cloning doesn't work, it's probably because you need to access the door controller and hit a few buttons to pair the remote directly. Also trivial, and also often pretty physically insecure. In the smaller apartment buildings I've lived in, the boxes containing these control units have usually just been hidden behind by a couple of screws and a "danger electricity" sticker.

If your current remote has multiple unused buttons on it as they often do, you can already try this out.

IMO for garage much easier to just add garage door opener that works from your phone.
And then I need to pull my phone to open the garage door? No thanks
Means you don’t need to carry your keys when you go for a walk and you can trigger via voice or iPhone’s shortcut button.

I still use button on the wall and if you actually park in garage you can keep using fob.

You can't even clone you garage door opener key anyway.

Flipper Zero and its clones have always been pseudohacker nonsense. Fun little party trick I suppose.

Sometimes you can clone them. My 20+ year-old condo uses non-rolling code "MegaCode". It's hit or miss.
Nope! Only occasionally. But it’s handy on those occasions.