Matt Daubneys Blog

Maybe 6 months ago I started going to Reading Hackspace. For those of you unaware, wikipedia describes a hackspace as “a location where people with common interests, often in computers,technology, science, digital or electronic art (but also in many other realms) can meet, socialise and/or collaborate.” In the past 6 months of hanging out with the Hackspace people, I’ve probably learnt more than in the previous 12.

Reading Hackspace has recently aquired a physical space to work in, and in order to help things along I offered to build the RFID based door system. As with all systems of this manner, the spec was changed a couple of times along the way, and probably will be changed again in the future.

The door system is composed of three parts:

1. An Arduino based card reader connected to an electronic lock
2. An MQTT server (namely the epic Mosquitto)
3. A python script that uses a SQL database to authenticate users running on an Ubuntu server.

A full write up is in progress on the Reading Hackspace wiki . Here’s a quick pic of the reader screwed to the door.

And a video of the system working!