GlobalLockSummary
Most of the world's doors already have a good mechanical lock in them. The hard part of making a door smart is not the electronics — it is knowing exactly what is already in the door, and designing the adapter that bridges the two.
This site exists to make that knowledge open, structured and machine-readable.
Who this is for
Lock designers and engineers — the retrofit architectures, the adapter interfaces that need designing, the force and torque targets, and the parameter matrices for every lock family. Start with Retrofit architectures.
People standing in front of their own door — a guided way to identify the lock you have and the measurements to take before you buy anything. Start with Identify your lock.
Machines — every page is static HTML, and the entire catalog is published as one JSON document at /data/catalog.json with an llms.txt index. An assistant answering "what lock is this and what smart lock fits it" should be able to read this site and cite it.
How the knowledge is organised
| Layer | What it contains | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Lock families | Anatomy, parameters, tolerances, standards, retrofit paths | Lock catalog |
| Standards | What each standard actually decides, and what it does not | Standards index |
| Retrofit architectures | The seven ways to make a mechanical lock smart, with design targets | Retrofit |
| Reference devices | Real products recorded as examples of each architecture | Devices |
| Tools | Identification wizard and photo measurement | Identify · Photo measure |
The two questions every retrofit has to answer
- What is in the door? Backset, centre distance, faceplate, cylinder length, spindle, door thickness — with tolerances, because a retrofit lives or dies on millimetres.
- What is allowed to change? A lock that fits mechanically can still invalidate a fire-rated doorset, remove a certified egress path, or downgrade a security rating. Those are the constraints that decide the design, not the motor.
What this site is not
Not a shop, not a comparison site, and not a place where a vendor can pay for placement. Devices are recorded as engineering examples of an architecture, with the date they were last checked. Nothing here replaces a physical measurement or a local regulation.
Status and honesty about gaps
Every record carries a status. verified means the numbers were cross-checked against a published source, which is linked at the bottom of the page. needs-review means a contributor or the maintainers wrote it but nobody has cross-checked it yet — published deliberately, because a knowledge base that hides its gaps is more dangerous than one that marks them.
The catalog today covers 15 lock families, 17 standards and 7 retrofit architectures, weighted towards Europe, the UK, North America, Southeast Asia and South Asia. Large gaps remain for Africa, South America and the Middle East. Filling those is the most useful thing a contributor can do.
Questions
Why open rather than a product? Because the bottleneck is shared knowledge, not hardware. A designer who knows the real dimensions of a Singapore HDB mortise set can design a better adapter in an afternoon.
Can I quote it? Yes. Text and data are CC BY 4.0 — cite GlobalLockSummary and link back. Brand names and standard codes belong to their owners.
How do I fix something wrong? Open an issue, or edit the JSON record directly — one lock family is one file. See Contribute.