Any building systems intergrators here?

[employeeno5]

I work for a door and hardware distributer. Today we began training on some new products coming out this summer from ASSA ABLOY (one of the largest lock and door hardware companies in the world; includes Corbin, Yale, Sargent, etc.) for electronic door locks and operators.

There is some really cool stuff here capable of operating both wired and wirelessly. The wireless stuff even runs on standard 811.02g/b so no $10,000 worth of brand name wireless repeaters needed.

Anyways, every single one of the products is completely open source and comes with an open source program for basic operations if you need it, or an open source SDK so you can easily integrate it with any existing system.

I was really impressed with some of the things you can do with these and the level of control you can get.

I just thought it was really cool to see another large corporation seeing that making their products open source is the best way to go for both them and their customers.

If it's your job to manage this sort of thing, keep your eyes open, they'll be pushing these products soon with integrators and architects all over the US.
It's some pretty excellent stuff and the SDK looks great.

I probably sound like a commercial. Sorry. I was just very excited to see a company I have to work with every day embracing open source for their new cutting edge products.

I know that most similar products currently on the market require allot of extra proprietary hardware and only run with proprietary software, or in some cases the product can only really be leased with a license for use rather than actually owning it.

Hi-five for more forward thinking in the building industry.

[SuperSon!c]

can you give me a link to an example of the wireless tech with locks? i'm already not a fan of that, but am curious as to how it looks and the hardware needed.

[employeeno5]

Some of what we saw today is some new stuff being added to the Sargent "Harmony" series:
http://www.sargentlock.com/products/access_control.html

They said that the technology would be available identically across all of their brands though.

I'm not seeing the wireless series we looked at here. I know that none of what we saw is going to be available until July so maybe there's no public info. yet.

I can tell you that it looks allot like the big footprint shaped thing below the Harmony series, but it's not the same series, it just looks similar externally.

The wireless units we saw today require no extra hardware. Everything is self contained. They can use any normal wireless router. They send and receive information in packets that are only about 12kb. You can set these up to only pull information off the network at individually scheduled times. So maybe only once or twice a day or even not at all unless you have a specific occasion, so they don't normally eat up any bandwidth. Meanwhile if you need to an individual unit to spit out data or receive new instructions you can physically go up to it and wave a fob that forces it to send/receive immediately. This is arranged as a security measure. Of course everything is open source though so any of that can be changed to suit your needs.

The real plus with the wireless units is that all you need is the lock and any $40 router from Bestbuy. No wires or special receivers are needed.

The wired models can do allot more. In fact they showed some of this: http://www.hi-o.se/Hio/Templates/PageThisIs____201.aspx

This is pretty neat. It lets the different devices on the door talk to each other directly without any extra setup or controlling required on the administrative end. It works just like plugging a USB device into a computer. You have one wire in and one wire out of a door opening not matter how many different devices you have installed at that opening. If you added an automated closer for example, it would just plug into the lock. The lock then instantly recognizes and integrates it into the complete opening controls. Plug and play access control and monitoring.

Today we got a good overview. Some of us are being sent to extensive training next month so when someone like yourself has questions I can really know what I'm talking about.

For now though, I was assured that all the software and firmware and everything is open source and the free SDK that comes with it sounded pretty great from responses they've gotten from from it so far with their beta testers.

That made me happy. The open source part. It seems the only sensible solution to me if you want to sell to people with pre-existing security systems or custom needs. I'm just glad to see them doing it.

I'm fairly new to the industry in general though, so there's a fair chance you may already know much more about these things than I do.

[SuperSon!c]

hey, thanks for all that great info. i'm still not a fan of wireless tech where it's not needed, especially in high security environments like this.