Goals and Road Map

Project Goals and Roadmap

This page outlines our vision for the Open Access Control initiative.

Evolution of the Project

This project came about when we wanted to add electronic access controls and monitoring to our Work Space.

We noticed that all of the existing commercial solutions fell into one of the following categories:

• Quality name-brand solutions that were really expensive
• Questionable offshore solutions that were cheap but had no documentation or support
• A few one-off custom designs people had made for themselves.

The commercial solutions had one thing in common: they were closed-source and we could not access the code in any way for customization or support of new devices.

Some of the custom designs we found looked promising, but were often based on a piece of difficult-to-source hardware that the creators had special access to.

Commodity Hardware and Software Focus

The pieces that we noticed were available as commodity items from many sources included:

• Electric Door hardware
• Power supplies and enclosures
• Alarm Sensors
• IP video cameras
• Small-format PCs
• Open-source software for many common tasks
  • Serial monitoring and logging
  • Secure e-mail and SMS alerting
  • Video processing
  • Storage management and archiving
  • Encryption
  • Basic embedded systems development

Our goal became to develop a fully open-source security solution made from commodity parts. This would enable anyone to write in support for new hardware, customize the work-flow for their systems, and take leverage the pool of existing open-source software for monitoring, processing, alerting, database storage and other tasks.

Initial Project Goals

The initial Open Access Control project had the following goals in mind:

• Control 2 doors with electric hardware
• Support 2 Wiegand-format readers
• Support 2 additional relays for chimes, sirens, etc.
• Have 4 supervised alarm zones
• Support a real-time clock (RTC)
• Run independently of a PC, with internal database
• Support attachment to a Linux PC for monitoring and alerting, remote access

We achieved this goal with the current design. Assembled boards, kits and readers are available in the ACCX Products Store.

Current Development Effort

Following the success of the original Open Access Control, many people have asked us to continue development of the project.

As a result, we formed ACCX Products as a way to provide open-source designs for the system, and pay for the project with by selling consulting, commercially-produced boards, starter kits and other items.

Latest Project

The current project is a ground-up revision of the Open Access Control. This has been tentatively called "Open Access v3.0" Check out the Open Access 3.0 Project Page for details.

Project Roadmap

• Develop a set of physical, electrical and logical interface standards to allow anyone working on open-source hardware and software for security applications to be compatible.
• Develop a framework for end-to-end encryption of security transactions using AES and other industry-standard algorithms
• Design a new bi-directional protocol for Mifare, Near Field Communication, and other types of readers that support challenge-response.
• Produce a set of development kits to facilitate development by others. This may include:
  • Wiegand break-out boards
  • RS-485 shields for Arduino
  • Low-cost single-door boards
  • Full featured Ethernet-capable boards
  • CAN BUS boards
• Standardize an SDK for others to create exciting new devices and software for home automation, security and access control