Project Profile: Access Control System (ACS)
Introduction Access Control Systems (ACSs) are used by many organizations, whether commercial or non-profit, as a means of providing scalable access to facilities or systems with finer degrees of control and fewer physical management problems than keys. When Triple Cities Makerspace (TCMS) moved into the old Spool Manufacturing building in Johnson City, NY back in 2013, the board wanted to provide members with 24/7 access to the new facilities using RFID tags and a computerized tag management system, as opposed to making use of physical keys which are easy to lose and hard to track. The first attempt at a homegrown access control project started with a single Arduino Atmega 2560 microcontroller board, a numeric keypad with a built-in RFID reader, and a circuit board of relays for controlling an electronic door lock. TCMS had all of this hardware at hand already, but no software to make the system actually work, and off-the-shelf systems weren’t really an option with the minimal budget available. Two then-new TCMS members, Adam Biener (a software developer / consultant) an