I moved into a new place, and the keys the landlord gave me are crappy copies on cheap blanks. Needless to say, I'll be having proper keys on OEM blanks code-cut as soon as I can stop by my favorite local place for such things. I took measurements of the keys in question, and fumbled with tables of bitting depths online for a while before deciding there had to be a more elegant way. Yes, I know you can buy a credit-card-sized key decoder, but this is more fun and gives you a much clearer picture of the condition of the key being examined and specifically the quality of the copy or code cutting.
http://kstoerz.com/locksport/bitting/
The default page loads up a fictitious Schlage key for an example. Output is presently a little primitive, but might get prettier as things go on. I wrote it from scratch over a few evenings using good old PHP and HTML. There is a MySQL table to organize the many different bitting systems it supports, but otherwise there isn't much to it.
Planned features:
- Allow numbered cuts (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, etc) to be mixed amongst measurements and interpreted seamlessly
- Generate a dynamic image of the key using GD to allow hold-it-up-to-the-screen sanity checking of your data entry
- make a page to list all of the bitting data from the database table in a nice format for reference
- other ideas?
I encourage your thoughts, criticism, ideas, etc. Are there other tools out there that serve this role that you are aware of?
