Tag Archives: door

DIY-er creates Star Trek style air-powered sliding door

DYI handyman Marc DeVidts has gone ahead and create the coolest door I’ve ever seen.  (It’s certainly not the biggest or most aesthetically pleasing, but’s it’s the coolest.)  He’s created a switch that opens the door (and can hold it open or closed), above the door is an air vent and that’s where the air from the air compressor (located in the attic) gets released when the door closes, and next to that is a control panel that allows him to disable the door and shut off the air supply. So go on, click play and watch the door open and make the “whoosh” sound when it closes.  DeVidts succedded in what he set out to do: construct “the perfect, most geek-ified entryway for [his] bedroom.”  If you are feeling the urge to build a door like this in your home, head over to Instructables where you’ll find a step-by-step guide authored by DeVidts himself.

[Via Gizmodo]

Glass globe doorknob: neat idea, voyeuristically destructive

In collaboration with UNION, a manufacturer of door handles and levers, architect Hideyuki Nakayama designed this glass globe doorknob.  Nakayama’s Room in a Glass Globe lets you “catch a glimpse of what appears to be another world, waiting for you to enter and join, but in fact is a reflection of the room on the other side of the door.”  I love the whole idea of peering into another dream-like world, but in reality this poetic doorknob is unfortunately introduces a major violation of privacy.

[Via MocoLoco; Gizmodo]

Face Recognition Door Lock makes checking into work a snap

Face recognition versus punch cards.  I wonder which one I would choose.  The former, duh!  The Face Recognition Door Lock was designed with purpose to keep track of company employees coming and leaving the job place.

It “features dual cameras (creating a 3D image that prevents false matches using a simple 2D photograph) , night vision, a 3.5 inch TFT display screen, touch keypad, USB and Ethernet port for TCP/IP connections, the ability to register up to 500 faces, and a verification process that supposedly takes less than a second.”  With the ability to store up to 150,000 attendance records of employees, I better start seeing this implemented in companies across the country.  Those damn punch cards never work right.  Here’s hoping facial recognition does.

[Via Gizmodo]

Door with a simple, elegant design hides “complex machinery” within

Created by Matharoo Associates (for a diamond merchant in India).

…the door is a whopping 17 feet high and five-and-a-half feet wide, and comprises 40 sections of Burmese teak, each of them nearly a foot thick. Each section revolves around some pretty complex machinery: The door’s single pivot hides a counterweight, 80 ball bearings, and 160 pulleys.  But they all work together invisibly. Push on any one plank, and all 40 sections reconfigure themselves into a sinusoidal curve, revealing an opening into the house.

That’s just freakin’ awesome.

[Via Gizmodo; Fast Company]

Secure your home with a ‘secret knock’

DYIer Steve Hoefer has created quite an interesting device.  Upon tapping a correct sequence and rhythm on a door this Arduino board-based device will unlock a dead-bolted door.  After artfully smushing together a microcontroller, a piezoelectric speaker, a gear reduction motor, and some PVC pipe Hoefer posted his dramatic results in the video above.  Neat, huh?

[Via Engadget]