Development of KPHOB has been a long journey. It started almost 5 years ago when I was building a prototype project at university lab and met this Japanese student who was meticulously working on a set of a tiny gears to attach to a key in order to have a lock indicator. The problem had occurred to me before, but I never thought it could be such a wide spread problem. After some basic research it was clear that the problem of door lock and car lock is a very common problem has not been addressed at all. I did a brief study of patents which also revealed that there were tens of issued patents mostly by mechanical solutions and occasionally by electronic methods, which all of them appeared to be far from being technically or economically viable.
With that background, KPHOB project began a year and half ago with simple idea of using a proximity sensor on the key and a magnet on the door to detect and register the times when we have used the key. that was not however a very convincing solution as it was not a reliable source of information as the sensor could be occasionally activated in presence of other magnetic fields. It also didn’t offer a solution to know whether we locked the door or unlocked it otherwise.
The next step was adding the means to measure the revolution of the keys so the user makes sure they locked the door properly. it means that we added a magnetometer and an accelerometer to the hardware just to detect the movements of the key. At the moment we are one step away from completion of the final hardware and we need to perfect our firmware for a better user interaction. we are at preliminary stage with recognition algorithm and we are seeking some funds to take this step faster. This is the moment of truth when we can see how many of those people who have problems with locking the door would actually convert to customer who enjoys the KPHOB solution. I love design and development and although it is a tough job to do as an entrepreneur, but it comes with a certain satisfaction of creating something that didn’t exist before. The harder job begings fron now…how to present the product and put it before the the audience who have concerns about their house security…
let’s do it!