The key problem
The development of IDO Electronics is linked with the rising amount of equipment, rooms, and the number of people. However, some of the resources shall be accessible only to a limited number of employees, for example:
- equipment used to test the devices,
- computers and documents with the confidential data,
- storage room with the products and parts.
In the beginning, there weren’t that many combinations of the access to the rooms. Each new employee on their first day of the work was given 2-3 keys that granted access to the right rooms.
Currently, we have many rooms in several buildings. Our team also has grown, and some of us aren’t even in the engineering team. A number of the keys and possible combinations made the issues of accessibility and safety really complicated. It got costly to make a copy of all the needed keys for each new employee and carrying the heavy kit is inconvenient. Moreover, it wasn’t entirely impossible that someone who, for example, was a former employee, might get a copy of the keys. For safety reasons, such a situation mustn’t happen.
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IDO Demoboard – Access Control System (ACS)IDO Demoboard – Access Control System (ACS) is a solution based on the IDO Demoboard project. We’ll describe that one in one of the future entries. The most important function of ACS is controlling access to the rooms. The integral part of the system consists of a proximity card reader and the working part – an electronic key lock. We linked into a network several such devices into a network, creating a net of safety access controlled rooms.
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Access to the rooms
After the card is drawn near the reader, if the employee has access to the room, the electronic key lock opens the door. Otherwise, the information about the denial of access is shown on the screen.
The administrator, with the use of GUI LCD of the device or by logging into the system is also able to:
- configure the network (on/off DHCP, change of IP address, masks, gateways, NTP servers);
- configure the MQTT server (domain names, cloud access data).
- Use of the GUI WWW to link locally to the device data allows to:
- configure the parameters of the network and server of the device,
- manage the users (adding/removing their access and permission levels),
- check the user’s logs.
- From the cloud level, the administrator is able to manage all the devices linked to the server. With several devices linked, they may be linked and gathered into groups.
The Effect
The introduction of the electronic access system was a hit! Thanks to one system we managed to improve in several areas:
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Safety
We are absolutely sure that only authorized employees have an access to the office and equipment.
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Comfort of the work
Instead of carrying many heavy keas, employees carry only one small card that fits any wallet.
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Effectiveness of work
Only a few clicks are needed to grant access to chosen rooms or to block completely the employee that changes work.
