New versions

[Arclight]

Hi guys,

I'm working on a couple of new boards for the Open Access system. One
is the Mega version that has 8 relays and 16 alarm zones, and the
other will probably be a smaller, all-SMT version of Open Access with
a regular Arduino chip on-board.

Some of the things you have requested are:

-Quick-detach screw terminals for easy servicing
-Built-in support for the RED/GRN LEDs on the readers and buzzer. You
-More alarm zones
-Ethernet and/or RS-485 support

What else would everyone like to see on the new boards?

I'm thinking about making the small version fit into a 2-switch
junction box that is sold at most hardware stores.

Does anyone think they need more than 2 readers per board? Crypto?
Keypads with LCD displays?


Thanks!


John

[dosman]

We like using RJ45 connectors and cat5 to connect our readers and door strikes. One 8-pin jack can drive 1 reader, 1 strike, and also drive the readers led and buzzer if desired. For our current open-access controller we made a pigtail adapter for this. While terminal blocks are probably more universal, this is a more "plug-n-play" option.

We've used these specific jacks before with good success:
http://bit.ly/xxyTpP

And these 6-way RJ45 blocks might work better for this application:
http://bit.ly/AFcocn

That's my 2 cents,
-dosman

[Will Bradley]

HeatSync has requested more request-to-exit logic; sometimes we want the motion sensor and button to work and other times we want only the button to work. So having a REX pin and logic can advance this to more of a proper access control system.

Also, I just popped an Arduino Ethernet on our board to start doing some basic http logging and web-based commands.

One recent issue we had seems to be short circuiting of the relay wiring causing doors to stay locked. This is a troubling failure mode, so any protections against this would be awesome; for example spacers, a bit of wire management, locating the common contact further away, etc.

[David M. N. Bryan]

Three or four door readers would be nice. We have two doors and a garage door that we want to actuate from the system. Having some way to show on the reader that the door is unlocked would be nice (and is needed for ADA compliance in some states).

Ethernet or serial would be cool, but not totaly necessary.

-David

[Scozza]

Hi John,

Integration with Pushingbox would be awesome (http://
pushingbox.com/). I'm trying to get it to tweet upon entry / exit so
members can tell if the space is occupied. Currently I can only
output the key code ideally we would like to be bale to tweet a
members name!

Cheers,

Scott.

[SteveFromBloomington]

Hi Scott,

At Bloominglabs, I've been working on a web interface to manage users.
So far, you can keep track of users, their ID number, the RFID tag
code, and some other identifying number (we use the number printed on
the tag). It's pretty manual so far. The goal is to integrate it
better with the Open-access-system, however I haven't worked out the
details of doing that via the serial port (yet).

Using arclight's monitoring code as a jumping off point, I've also
written an irc bot (doorbot) that looks at the tail of the rfid log
(like arclight's auto-mailer does), and then looks up the user by id
in the database managed via the web interface. The bot says 'steve is
here', or whatever, and logs the details in the same database. The
nice thing is I also added a motion sensor recently, and it logs those
alerts, too. The bot is interactive, you can say 'last 10 access', and
it'll give you the last 10 people and times the door was opened, or
'last 10 sensor' to get the same info for the motion sensor. At some
point I might log info on Pachube (something like this:
https://pachube.com/feeds/42215)

It should be easily adaptable for a twitter bot, too. In the general
open-source spirit the code is out on github: https://github.com/sdcharle/Bloominglabs

Take a look if you're curious. It runs on a Linux server we have at
the space, and the key things to know are Python, SQLite database, and
the Django web framework. If somebody wants to take a stab at
integrating the database and the Arduino/serial interface better,
that'd be great (just please let me know).

Thanks,
Steve from Bloominglabs

[Arclight]

Nice work! I think what's really needed next is a daemon that runs continuously, attaches to available serial ports that have Open Access connected to them, and then logs/takes action/queries the database as needed.

Perhaps the C libraries in minicom would be a good place to start?

John

[Scozza]

That sounds great Steve!  I'll ask our linux guru to have a squiz at it!  We already have an Ubuntu server up and running so that may be the solution!

Cheers,

Scott.

[Arclight]

Scott,

Please let me know if you need help on this. I think that a serial
interface is always going to be present somewhere in the solution. If
we want cheap, distributed door controllers then a $4 RS-485 chip lets
us cable them all together in one run back to the server master board.

Letting the Raspberry Pi or another small server do the "heavy
lifting" of HTTPS/SSL, DNS, DHCP, firewall, etc just makes the most
sense to me.

The embedded system (Arduino) does the "dumb but critical" tasks like
opening doors and arming/disarming the alarm from a cached copy of the
user list, while the Linux device does the "sophisticated but less
critical" tasks like user administration via the database, Twitter
updates, web-based configuration, etc.

John

[David M. N.. Bryan]

Perl or python API?

--

David M. N. Bryan

612-978-9765