[jerrytsai]

What a thorough and interesting review. I was wondering why all the attention is placed on the locks and have been thinking that, a la many apartment buildings in cities with their buzz-in door locks, why not approach the "smart lock" problem by using electric strikes? A drawback would be you would need to supply power to the door frame, but then you wouldn't have to deal with worrying about when the batteries run out of juice.

To put it another way, suppose that, planning ahead, I install an electric strike that allows me to "buzz in" people. Then what I would like to do is be able to "buzz in" using a smartphone app, say.

[Pyrodogg]

Lockitron is also working on controlling existing electronic strikes. https://lockitron.com/store/buzzer

[bravo22]

They're not working on it as something new. That was their first product many years ago.

[Pyrodogg]

Interesting, i'd never heard about that until pretty recently. To be honest, when I think of Lokitron all I think of is the deadbolt product, and then mostly manufacturing/shipping delays.

[bravo22]

Their first product was very similar to the deadbolt one but it was a retrofit electronics for someone else's mechanical deadbolt. It was also powered and had to be connected to Ethernet. I'm going by memory and could be a bit off on the details.

But yeah the deadbolt is a refinement of their earlier product. Which makes me a bit baffled about how badly executed it is the second time around.