Jul 012017
 
Suomenkielinen versio täällä.

Why?

One day I just needed an access control system and reservation calendar to a common use sauna, and it had an electric lock (24VAC) already in place.

Hardware (links to Finnish shops):

Stage 1 (memory card):

Raspberry Pi got the newest Raspbian Jessie, which was at the moment in version 2017-06-21. Kernel for the distribution is 4.9.28-v7+.

Stage 2 (assembly):

  • detach controller from the TFT (TFT-enclosure required this)
  • assemble the TFT enclosure
  • attach the controller to the TFT, make sure both cables are in place
  • drill holes to the bottom of RasPi enclosure (6mm drill), to use TFT -attachment points
  • insert memory card to RasPi
  • attach RasPi with it’s enclosure to TFT
  • attach the cable from TFT to RasPi, along with 5V(pin4) and Gnd(pin6) with jumper wires
  • attach NFC-reader with jumper wires to RasPi, you’ll use pins 1,3,5,11,12,15,16,19,21-26 (f.ex 3.3V, Gnd, i2c & SPI)
    (Explore NFC Board Schematic)
  • attach relay card module to RasPi, relay needs ~80mAh of current so take note of this when deciding the PSU
    pins 2 (5V -> VCC), 7 (GPIO -> In1) and 9 (Gnd -> Gnd) are needed
  • attach the relay between the another power cable going to the electric lock

Stage 3 (software):

Reader uses SPI, so enable SPI at raspi-config. TFT will rotate by adding display_rotate=1 (90 degrees) or display_rotate=3 (270 degrees) to /boot/config.txt – and console font can be made bigger with dpkg-reconfigure console-setup.

For actual use you need a small stack of software. Relay module must be controller (to open/close door) and NFC-card must be read and validated against some user database. And unless you want to keep the user database up-to-date by hand, there should be something for that also…

My solution was a simple python-service, which reads the NFC-card, validates is against data in MariaDB and after that tells the result on screen & activates the relay if necessary. Almost up to date code can be found at https://macronet.fi/dev/nfc/ (maybe later at github also) – it might work, or not.

Library used for reading the NFC-card is nxppy -that and all other requirements are easy to install:

# sudo apt install python-dev python-pip python-mysqldb cmake mariadb-server-10.0
# pip install nxppy

Stage 4 (installation):

Install the system to the place you want, so that you can show a card to the reader. This might need some cables if you want to take the reader further away – please make note that the reader requires 14 wires (haven’t actually tested if it works without i2c, because it uses SPI) so it’s like 2 cat5e cables.

Stage 5 (why internet connection? and then what?)

Make RasPi to call home/VPN, so that you are able to fix problems remotely.

Or “forget” a wireless keyboard receiver to USB-port and use your new NFC-enabled access control system as an IRC-client.