I wonder what kind of success this might have, because this is clearly something they built either internally or for a client and turned it into a off the shelf product.
I have built stuff who could even compete with that.
InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#12Shameless plug: If this interests you, I am building similar technology for enterprises at Verkada, reach out to me I'm looking for builders
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#13Shameless plug: If this interests you, I am building similar technology for enterprises at Verkada, reach out to me I'm looking for builders
I don't want to be hostile but your camera pricing seems insanely high. It looks like you are competing for the same market as Reolink which has what appears to be a similar product for a TINY fraction of the cost probably 10x or less.
What is the benefit of your product vs theirs?
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#14Shameless plug: If this interests you, I am building similar technology for enterprises at Verkada, reach out to me I'm looking for builders
I'd be interested in chatting. I don't see an email in your profile, let me know how to get in touch & I'll drop you a line this week. :)
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#15RC522 and ESP32 is something an amateur can glue together. I cannot see why is this project a thing. I would expect a TPM alike module at least.
Cost/performance, time to market, IDE, ability for others to understand
Cost will be lower with your own design because you'll integrate other components on the same board. It needs power, probably battery backup too. It needs to control some coil of electromagnetic lock. Access control is more than just flashing LEDs.
It has IDE because ESP32 has IDE.
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#16Shameless plug: If this interests you, I am building similar technology for enterprises at Verkada, reach out to me I'm looking for builders
I don't want to be hostile but your camera pricing seems insanely high. It looks like you are competing for the same market as Reolink which has what appears to be a similar product for a TINY fraction of the cost probably 10x or less. What is the benefit of your product vs theirs?
That's a great question. Hard to answer in a comment. It's sort of apples & oranges. The way I think about it, we are targeting a different customer (enterprise vs small business/home) and we are solving the problem in a different way (no nvr, cloud first, deeply integrated, extremely easy to install and maintain, dedicated customer support). In my mind, it's something like Reolink:Verkada::Self hosting:AWS
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#17Shameless plug: If this interests you, I am building similar technology for enterprises at Verkada, reach out to me I'm looking for builders
I'd be interested in chatting. I don't see an email in your profile, let me know how to get in touch & I'll drop you a line this week. :)
Email sent :)
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#18RC522 and ESP32 is something an amateur can glue together. I cannot see why is this project a thing. I would expect a TPM alike module at least.
If it comes with the box, then that's reason enough for me.
Consider a "smart" door bell. Sure, it's easy to attach a camera to an RPi and a button, but I don't want to strap that to my front door without a nice box to put it in.
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#19RC522 and ESP32 is something an amateur can glue together. I cannot see why is this project a thing. I would expect a TPM alike module at least.
I see it as similar to a RPi - great for POC or smaller deployments, especially if you have different requirements on different projects because you can share the same knowledge base, but for a large deployment you'd probably invest the time and money into sourcing something more specific. I've had lots of half-baked ideas for things to do around the house that this would be very cool for, since I'm not 100% sure wha…
Honestly, it's not THAT hard with Raspberry PI Pico and CircuitPython.
I have experience of programming for ARM M0 with Linaro, debugging over SWD. It was pain.
A few weeks ago I got Tiny2040, flashed with CircuitPython. I believe even a teenager can now do some microcontroller stuff. It's so unbelievably easy.
Re: InstaNFC – Access Control Hardware for Developers
#20It's not a good idea to have the decision making happening on the outside of the door you want to protect. Ideally, the outside component should just be the antenna and the microcontroller should be on the inside of the door.
As they demonstrate in the video, you can open their example case with a screwdriver, so then you could either short some connections to release the door lock (if it's self-contained), or connect to the ESP to grab a copy of its firmware and configuration to connect directly back to whatever controller it talks to over wifi (if it's part of a larger system).