Even though my company’s main office moved to Yokohama, I still spend a lot of time at HQ, so I’ve been doing this split-life thing lately, splitting my week between Tokyo and Hamamatsu. I always had a feeling something like this would happen… and it finally did! After taking the Shinkansen and arriving late at night at Hamamatsu Station, I realized I’d forgotten (or lost!) my keys. It gave me a bit of a fright, but thankfully I called home and confirmed my keys were there. All I needed now was for my trusty SwitchBot, which I’d set up for exactly this kind of emergency, to work perfectly. Still, I couldn’t help but worry a little about its battery dying or some other hiccup.
Unlocking the Shared Entrance Remotely with SwitchBot
For apartments, installing a smart lock on your own front door is easy enough, but what you really need to think about is unlocking the shared entrance. Ideally, right after you punch in your room number at the shared entrance, you’d be able to press the unlock button for the shared entrance on your intercom inside your home. It seems like I could achieve this by remotely operating SwitchBot’s “Bot” (finger robot).
Setting up this “Bot” was quite sensitive to its placement, and I had to do a lot of trial and error. There were a few times when the small “finger” part of the Bot wouldn’t properly register a press on the large unlock button, or the setup became unstable and wobbly, rendering it useless. It eventually ended up looking like the picture (the USB adapter’s height was a perfect fit, haha).
Crisis Averted, But…
Although I had actually tried unlocking both the shared entrance and my smart lock with fingerprint authentication a few times before, I always had my physical keys with me, which gave me peace of mind that I could just open it manually if anything went wrong. This time, I didn’t have that fallback, so I was pretty anxious.
However, both the shared entrance and the smart lock unlocked without any issues, and I was spared any major trouble. Still, going keyless all the time feels impossible to me, mainly due to worries about battery life and network connectivity.
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