Embedded Lab

Daniel Gilbert shares his experience of building the PinTin Nano, a Intel Edison powered portable password keeper.

PinTin Nano stores passwords for your accounts

With this instructable, I try to solve a problem everyone has: Passwords. Accounts. Logins. All the stuff you need to get into your favourite social media site, shopping site, blog or forum (they still exist, huh?). Now, there are several ways to control your accounts:

• Use always the same credentials: No. Never ever do that. Seriously. If your account gets hacked on one site, chance is that the hacker(s) will try the credentials on other, popular sites also. Don’t underestimate them. They are smart. Criminals, but smart.
• Use a software on every device: You can do that. And if you are lucky, this software will run forever on this device. But maybe, at some point, you will get rid of the devices. Uh-oh…
• Write them down: Yepp. You can do that. But – everyone who finds your book will be able to read your passwords. That wouldn’t be that great, right?

To solve all of this, I created a device called “The PinTin Nano”. It has it’s name from the fact that it’s a) pretty small and b) fits in a mint tin. I love that, because that makes the device easy to carry around.