Two MIT students might have a lucrative safe cracking career to fall back on if they don’t land jobs that interest them.

“I’m not referring to those telephone spamming machines that call you during dinner time or while you’re sleeping. This is robotic safe cracking. Two curious MIT students with a mysterious safe and a bit of free time built a laptop-controlled robotic fixture that opened a “manipulation proof”, high security safe in just a few hours.

Instead of buying off the shelf motion controllers and hacking these together to build a complete system, I opted for an all-in-one controller. I built an Atmel microcontroller based control board to connect Grant’s laptop to the stepper motor, RC servo, optical encoder, limit switches, an optional LCD screen. The control board connects to a laptop via USB and talks to a computer just like a serial port. I wrote the microprocessor firmware in C and used an in-circuit programmer to download code to the chip. There are about two thousand lines of code in the firmware, and that does not include any of the actual dialing algorithms. After two rounds of PCB’s and about a dozen firmware revisions, we had a fully functional dialer.”

Via: Hackaday