Fancy new smart lock can see who’s at your door

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nucli smart lock by westinghouse
The Nucli smart lock by Westinghouse.
Photo: Westinghouse

Electrics giant Westinghouse is getting into the connected-home game, and its first offering is a smart lock that looks like it should be seeing if it can’t lock down a stabilizer in a Star Wars X-Wing.

The Nucli (which is pronounced “new-klee” and not “nuck-lee,” regardless of how your brain sees it) will offer a wealth of features to help you secure your domain.

You can learn more about the Nucli, which is currently on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, in the video below.

https://youtu.be/Stwh66pp8Xg

We have to admit that the Nucli is looking pretty good. We like the exterior camera and speaker system, even if the demonstration in that video is slightly awkward. But it is nice to know that the smart lock will make you feel so secure that you’ll be able to enjoy not one but two glasses of wine, safe within the confines of your secure smartbunker home.

And of course, no smart lock would be complete without a thumbprint scanner. The Nucli also lets you use a keypad, the companion app or a fob, which is, like, three more ways to open a door than one with a dumb lock on it, but this one lets people leave voice messages and stuff.

Westinghouse was looking for $50,000 to fund production of the Nucli, and as of this writing, it’s raised $84,839 with two weeks left in its campaign. The company anticipates that it will start shipping the smart lock by the end of the year, and it will sell for about $440.

We’re not sure at this point if Nucli will be compatible with Apple’s HomeKit framework, which would let you control this smart lock with digital assistant Siri (thus providing yet another way to get in that isn’t an old-fashioned key). Apple doesn’t have any smart locks listed on its current list of HomeKit-compatible devices, although a Kwikset model did appear on the screen during the presentation at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

Westinghouse wasn’t listed among the initial list of partners for Apple’s home-automation platform, but that doesn’t mean that the Nucli won’t show up there someday. It probably needs to launch first, for one thing.

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