So I was half way into my BSS Journey, and got stuck between two almost-right solutions.
One could open the door, but couldn’t manage users properly.
The other could manage users, but couldn’t open the door I needed.
It felt like buying a car where one model had an engine but no steering wheel, while the other had a steering wheel but no engine.
The Alibaba Sample Graveyard
Naturally, I went to Alibaba.
I contacted every smart lock, intercom, and access control factory I could possibly find. That became a small project of its own.
The first problem was communication. My question was not simple:
Can your device remotely create, change, and disable customer PINs through the cloud — and also control an electric sliding door or roller shutter?
Most salespeople replied quickly:
“Yes, yes, support.”
Which, as I later discovered, often meant:
“I have not fully understood the question, but I would still like you to buy a sample.”
So I bought one sample after another.
I waited one or two weeks for them to arrive. I tested them. And again and again, the answer was the same: each device could do one half of the job, but not the other.
Before long, my office had become a small museum of disappointment — smart locks, intercoms, keypads, controllers, cables, power supplies, and instruction manuals translated into English with great courage but limited accuracy.
Each sample told the same story:
Almost right.
But not right enough.
Eventually, I stopped buying more samples and asked factories whether I could test their devices remotely before ordering. That created another problem: my required quantity was too small for most factories to care.
I was not a distributor ordering 10,000 units. I was just one stubborn small business owner trying to solve one awkward problem.
By this stage, I had already passed the halfway point of my BSS journey. I had survived planning permission, building works, roof cladding, electrics, cloud logic, APIs, encryption, and Pulsar messaging.
I was not prepared to be stopped by a stupid market oversight.
A New Name Kept Appearing: TTLock
During all these searches, one name kept appearing again and again:
TTLock
At first, I ignored it. I was already deep inside the Tuya ecosystem and didn’t want another platform, another app, another API, and another set of headaches.
But the Tuya route was reaching a dead end, so I reluctantly looked closer.
TTLock felt different.
Tuya tries to control everything — lights, cameras, sockets, switches, sensors, appliances, and probably one day your kettle’s emotions.
TTLock focuses mainly on locks and access control.
That focus mattered.
Access control is not just another smart-home feature. It involves people, permissions, timing, safety, records, and security. It seemed TTLock understood this problem far better than the general smart-home platforms.
Most TTLock devices work mainly by Bluetooth, which allows batteries to last for years. A dedicated gateway then connects the lock to the internet, so PINs can still be created, changed, or deleted through the cloud.
Even better, TTLock uses a much simpler API system and supports webhooks.
After my recent battle with Tuya’s Pulsar messaging and encryption keys, seeing “webhook” felt like finding a motorway sign after being lost in country lanes for three hours.
The Flow Becomes Simple Again
With TTLock, the access-control logic became much cleaner.
A customer books and pays for a unit.
The website sends an API request to TTLock, asking it to create or update that customer’s PIN.
The customer arrives and enters the PIN.
The lock opens.
TTLock sends a webhook to my AWS server, confirming the access event.
My system records it automatically.
That was exactly what I had wanted from the beginning.
No endless device chatter.
No Pulsar messages.
No encryption puzzle every time I wanted to know whether someone had opened a door.
For access control, I didn’t need a noisy classroom.
I needed a reliable receptionist.
TTLock looked much closer to that.
Then Came the Roller Shutter Problem
For a few days, I thought the access-control problem was finally solved.
I should have known better.
Merit House has roller shutters at the entrance. My first idea was simple: use a TTLock keypad or controller to open the roller shutter when a customer enters the correct PIN.
In my head, it was perfect. Then the builder stopped me.
He insisted that UK safety regulations would not allow customers to operate the roller shutter in that way. A roller shutter is not just a door. It is a large moving machine, and if it comes down on someone, “my smart system told it to” is not a legal defence.
Suddenly, another crisis appeared.
After all the work to build automated access control, the very entrance of the building might not be allowed to work the way I needed.
My humanless self-storage dream was once again standing at the edge of a cliff.
Next Chapter: The Wicket Door with TTLock
free to follow my BSS journey — a real, unfiltered account of building an independent self-storage business in the UK, one problem, mistake, and hard-won solution at a time.
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