[Noisebridge-discuss] Fwd: RFID door

[Naomi Most]

a friendly suggestion from our hackerspace friends in Huntsville, AL


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: matthew varian <123321mail at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, May 12, 2014 at 6:18 AM
Subject: RFID door
To: pnaomi at gmail.com


Hi my name is Matt, I am in Huntsville, AL part of makerslocal256
(https://256.makerslocal.org) and i frequent other hackerspace's email
lists from time to time to keep up with other's ideas/issues/projects
etc I noticed recently there has been talk of setting up an RFID door
to help control access to your facility. I thought I would share the
solution we used at our shop as its fairly unique but also one of the
things a lot of people think is cool.

We basically have a door with an electronic dead bolt, and its
controlled not with a RFID tag/read, but rather there is a USB port
next to the door the members plug in their USB device(can be a USB
thumb drive, a cellphone, a computer mouse :P anything) and the system
reads the serial number of the device used(not a file on it just the
hardware serial number), compares that # to a white lists as to who
may enter and then toggles the door accordingly. We are in the midsts
of redoing it to use a rPi for the computer bit, but here is the old
system write up: https://256.makerslocal.org/wiki/USB_Auth

The biggest advantage to this system is that it uses preexisting USB
devices, not requiring us to buy any RFID cards. Although it seeing
some of the emailed concerns about RFID i can see how there will be as
many(maybe more) with the system we use, but i though i would pass it
along. I do hope you guys are able to figure out a solution that helps
mitigated the issues that your having.

 Matt V
 thematthewknot