Combination Lock Cracking Lego Robot

F1rst p0st l0l

I'm working on building a 100% Lego rotary combination lock cracking robot. It cracks using a brute force technique. Since pure brute-force of a 40-number combination lock yields 64,000 combinations, (40^3) it skips every other number, reducing the possible combinations to 8,000 (20^3). It also uses a technique to speed cracking, by checking every third number in one go.

Of course, all these things are just theoretical, as I haven't had time to load the software yet. I've been preoccupied building the hardware in the lab, and writing the code at home.

I decided to start this project when I came across a lock which did not conform to the lock-cracking algorithm for Masterlocks. As such, I've avoided using "patterns" of combinations, and instead left the robot to pure brute-force, so that it would recover a combination from any lock, including ones which don't conform to standard lock rules.

Videos and more after the break.