Goals and Road Map

Project Goals and Roadmap

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

Why are we doing this?

This project came about when we wanted to add electronic access controls and monitoring to our Hackerspace, the 23b Shop. We noticed that all of the existing commercial solutions fell into two categories:

• Quality name-brand solutions that were really expensive
• Questionable offshore access controllers 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.

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 lucked into finding as surplus.

Our goal became to develop a fully open-source security solution from commodity parts. We also wanted it to be affordable.

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

After installing the Open Access Control in a few places, 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.

Our current project is to improve on the Open Access Control design and produce something close to the feature-set of the closed-source products available.

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