March 24, 2026
Open sesame, but make it Apple
Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
DIY buzzer hack saves the day as commenters roast lazy landlords and flimsy gate tech
TLDR: A tenant’s friends turned a dead lobby intercom into a smart-home door opener, exposing how fragile many systems are. Commenters split between praising DIY heroics and blasting landlords, with extra heat over weak security, janky cheap fixes, and landlords’ broken promises about phone number privacy.
When a building’s buzzer stopped working because management let the phone service lapse, a pair of friends quietly wired the lobby box into Apple’s smart home system—and the internet had thoughts. Commenters cheered the ingenuity, side‑eyeing the landlord and an intercom industry some called “embarrassingly behind.” One reader joked this was “Open Sesame, powered by Siri,” while another said the router vendor “loses to a bag of rocks,” echoing the post’s own roast of default passwords and unlocked panels.
The mood split fast: tinkerers like [wzdd] bragged about their own stealthy fixes (“discreet USB cable,” anyone?), and [FlorinSays] dropped a link to dirt‑cheap, janky boards in Romania that do the job for under €30. Meanwhile, [jeffwilcox] sounded the alarm: these Doorking boxes are being ripped out across Seattle because crooks learned the same tricks—pushing buildings toward subscription systems like ButterflyMX. And the privacy angle exploded too: [cryptoz] said landlords have lied for years about phone numbers being hidden in buzz‑in systems.
Between the claps and the clutching of pearls, the thread turned into a referendum on modern access tech: should tenants DIY when landlords won’t, or does this prove we’ve built a “smart” gate that’s dumb at security? Either way, the comments were buzzing.
Key Points
- •Management failed to renew the intercom’s cellular service, disabling voice calls for entry.
- •The intercom is a DoorKing 1834-080 with a DoorKing 1800-010 voice box in an unlocked enclosure.
- •A Wi‑Fi/cellular router with the admin password printed on it was found; default credentials worked.
- •The router’s web UI allowed exporting the full configuration, enabling SSH/Telnet and resetting the root password.
- •The project’s aim is to discreetly integrate the intercom with Apple Home; subsequent attempts are outlined but not detailed in the excerpt.