Build a keyless entry system with Amazon Connect and AWS IoT Core

Have you ever had guests visiting while you were out, expected a delivery during work hours, or wanted to unlock your home without digging out your keys?

This tutorial walks you through building a self-service, secure, and auditable way to provide physical access to a home, office, or other location using Internet of Things (IoT) and a cellular phone with Amazon Connect and AWS IoT Core. Although this walkthrough focuses on a home automation use case, this implementation is also applicable to other building management scenarios.

Amazon Connect is an easy to use, omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide a contact center in the cloud with consumption based pricing. With this model, there’s no need to stand up infrastructure for a large call center if you’re starting small, or in this case, working on telephony-enabled IoT project. With Amazon Connect you can deploy a fully managed contact center solution and build automated workflows without the need for code.

AWS IoT Core lets you connect IoT devices to the AWS cloud without the need to provision or manage servers. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT Core, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

In this example, you use Amazon Connect to create a contact flow that sets the experience for your callers when they call into your phone number for keyless entry. For authentication, you use an AWS Lambda function deployed through an AWS CloudFormation template and store access codes in Amazon DynamoDB database. Then, using FreeRTOS, you set up a microcontroller, relay, and sensor that controls the door lock mechansim for entry. After testing the application using your Amazon Connect contact flow for keyless entry, you can optionally add additional AWS IoT functionality, continue running the application, or clean up and delete your resources.