Elevator Hacking

When I take my laundry out of the dryer, I have to go 14 floors down to the laundry room, get the laundry, and then go back to the elevator - which invariably has been called up to the 23rd floor. There are actually three elevators in my building, but they are not very well scheduled.

While waiting with my laundry to go back up to my apartment, I realized that elevators are one of the most common and simple programmable devices anywhere. Sure, it's just pressing one button, but it's programming nonetheless.

Naturally, as a programmer, I started wondering what I could program the elevator to do. Is there any way for me to avoid having to wait so long after I pick up my laundry? What sort of elevator hacking is possible?

One idea is to press the buttons of one or two floors just above the laundry level, in the hopes that after I quickly pick up my laundry the elevator will be a floor or two above me, and will quickly come when I press the button.

Any other suggestions? No jamming the doors allowed!

Unfortunately, the elevator's "programming" that you can do is not very portable. Each lift has its own firmware in it, and they differ greatly from version to version. However, try putting a human in the elevator, or a trained monkey/dog which knows to press the laundry room button after a certain number of minutes.

Or make a nifty machine that plugs onto the button panel inside, and people can queue elevator destinations like a cron job with a whole slew of timers.

The elevator at my dorm had a special keyhole at the ground floor, which was intended to be used by the fire brigade in case of a fire. By luck, one of the keys on my keychain fitted the lock, which caused the elevator to stop and return to the ground floor immediately, regardless of what it was doing. Got quite a few puzzled looks from people who were going from 2nd to 3d and were suddenly 'hijacked' to the ground floor :^).

A similar trick could be used inside the elevator: get in, look at all the people already inside and all the lit buttons for the floors they want to go to, sigh, turn key in lock inside elevator (which resets their selections) and press the button of the floor you're interested in >^).

Whoa, dude -- nice way to invite yourself to a blanket party. Heh.

Some elevators have an 'emergency stop' button. Yours might not be hooked up to an alarm bell, or the alarm could be a trivial nuisance (not very alarming). Of course, it might be hooked up to the security guard desk who might take a dim view of your "time saving technique".

BTW, I take a dim view of people who mess around with elevators. I've been trapped in an elevator twice and it is not fun. <lecture>Also, alarms and fireman controls are meant for real emergencies. Hacking around with them might cause them to fail in a real emergency.</lecture> also might uncover real failures that would otherwise only become evident in real emergencies

Some elevators are such that a trapped occupier can release the doors and hence exit (even if the elevator has stopped slightly short of the correct position). However, the procedure for doing so may be far from obvious, and the elevator may remain stuck.

Sometimes it helps to send the elevator to some other floor (e.g. 23rd) just before you leave in the first floor and then immediate after you get out and the elevator departs call it again.

The real solution here is a proper elevator management system. This would involve a sort-of PID self training mechanism that would learn the elevator's usage on some schedule, such as daily or weekly. The cars should be spread out among the floors evenly to start with. Then, as the users establish regular usage patterns, the elevator manager could figure out where to put the cars to minimize call response times.

I'm working on an update to the elevator project page where I'll put all this drivel when it's done.

In the future, assuming WiFi is pervasive, it is not hard to imagine the elevators broadcasting their position/direction to a server somewhere you could open (also wirelessly) from internet or local server (with a logon if needed so only residents of that building could see). Then from your HandHeld or internet enabled phone you could know the position of each lift graphically real time (ie using ScalableVectorGraphics or similar). You would not be programming but you could time your arrival - "program" yourself - from wherever you are in the building to get to the elevator banks in time knowing when you press the button one is headed your way. Presumably lots of residents using this system would also balance the load more evenly (many people would not be pushing the button at the same time). It could even use demand averages for that time of day/day of week to show expected rate (floors per second).

BuzzwordBingo!

Not really just a few years ago such monitoring by ordinary people would have been difficult, expensive, impractical. These technologies allow the UseCase above to be realized easily if someone wanted to. The nature of Wiki is to define specifics and refer to them if such pages exist. For instance SVG is needed (as opposed to say plain html altough that could be used with bitmaps for version 1) as a dynamic graphical view would give the user maximum information in the shortest time. People are genuinely concerned about waiting on their elevators even if you optimize scheduling it helps a user to know if one is broken down, what they are actually doing. Buildings will probably have all kinds of local wireless info for AGMs, when the pool will be opening, garage cleaning, next RealBingo? why not add elevator stats as well? Modern elevators gather this info anyway (as does your car see AutomobileHacking) to a central processor and can often be viewed/managed remotely by the installer. It would just need EnterpriseApplicationIntegration to sync the main stats to a condo or propertymanagement web server which is then trivial to broadcast to tenants wirelessly. Security, ROI etc would be issues but then this page is just for fun anyway

I think this calls for the psychic elevators described in the HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy.

No. Because these elevators had a limited ability to see into the future, they tended to become depressed and sulk in the basement.

Isn't that where the laundry room is?

RemoteViewing? would be especially handy for the SpaceElevator which would have lengthy InterArrival? times.

Apparently some Otis lifts have a feature whereby holding the close door button and floor number will give cart priority. I read this on an EasterEgg site but have yet to find a lift that includes this feature.

<rant>Has anyone noticed how some people just don't understand elevators? How they push both the up and the down button when calling it, while they just need to go up, so that the elevator will stop on that floor on its way down, causing extra delay? Why is it that some people just don't understand such a simple device?</rant>

<afterthought>I know I used to push both buttons when I was a kid, but I was a kid and liked to push buttons.</afterthought>

Check this out..It certainly is possible to control an elevator from PC or Smartphone. 1.Reset elevator. Release passengers. 2.Place call to send elevator to given floor. 3.Monitor status of elevator including floor position. Like us on Facebook: smircforelevators or check out www.smirc.com.au for more details. Smart Monitoring Incorporating Relay Control. SMIRC for Elevators.