[sudoroom] Electronic door access control

[Marc Juul]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Matthew Senate <mattsenate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Cool,
>
> Marc, do you care to take the lead on this? I'm also in.

Yes I'll take the lead on this unless someone else is itching to do it?

I would have suggested we set up pin + magstripe card access, since
that means that people can register any old card from their wallet and
also allows us to grant temporary pin-only access to visitors without
access to the door and without additional hardware.

The problem is that I'm having some trouble finding a cheap
outdoors-resistant pin + magnet card reader. Labitat uses one of these
https://encrypted.google.com/shopping/product/2080597187139231092 (+
an rfid reader) that was bought cheaply on ebay, but it seems they're
hard to find now.

The best I could find was this:
  http://www.ebay.com/itm/GE-Casi-Rusco-Model-435-Magnetic-Mag-Stripe-Card-Reader-Keypad-430083501-NEW-/280737500796?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item415d424e7c

but I'm not sure we can easily interface to that.

Does anyone have a suitably outdoorsy pin+card box lying around?

I guess we could go with rfid only to begin with and keep costs low.
It should be less prone to breaking as well since it can be easily
weather proofed / hidden and has no moving parts.

-- 
Juul