We now all know that the door is going to be opened through the activation of either an electric strike, or a maglock. But what tells these devices to function? That is the job of the access system itself. An access system consists of two smaller systems - an input system, and an output system.
The primary component of the input system is a card reader. Typically, and especially in fitness club access systems, this is a barcode reader (see photo). A weatherproof barcode reader mounted to the outside of the fitness center waits for your members to swipe their membership card or keytag through it. It then sends this information to your computer, and more importantly, to your member management software, as input. Since I'm going to spend time in the next post discussing the details of the software and computer, let's just simplify things for now and assume that the member who swiped their card is a valid member.
With that valid member input, your computer system will then send an output to a door controller (see photo). The door controller is an electronic device that picks up that signal and provides the power needed to activate the electric strike. As we learned previously, if you are using a maglock, the door controller keeps that device powered all the time, and when it wants to unlock the door, it actually cuts power.So we've learned that once we get past the door hardware, we find the access system, which is simply an input and output system that manages the electric strike or maglock. Next week, we'll get into the final component of the access system - the computer (and software).
2 comments:
I hired a security company to give me a quote on an access system. They said they plan to use prox cards. Do they work the same way as membership cards that have barcodes on them?
The overall theory of operation is the same, which is that the prox card is the medium that contains the member's identifying information on it, same as a barcoded membership card or keytag.
One major differences are that prox cards are more expesive and quite a bit larger than keytags ($3 each compared to 50 cents each).
Also, the majority of fitness software vendors cannot decipher the data coming in from a prox card - they prefer barcode data. If this is the case with your software provider, that means you may have to maintain two separate member databases, which is not very efficient.
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