Anyone interested in a VHS group project? @wander had a great idea of doing a group project of putting together an integrated IoT package for member card tap around VHS. Along the lines of NFC + WiFi + etc to help bootstrap people’s projects & fun ideas to use VHS member cards to tap things around the space. Some of the ideas, door access, tool lockouts, room/tool reserve queues, beer counter, etc.
I think if we design it as a kit then it can serve as a good “learn to IoT” type project for new members but also be a cool way to integrate creative projects with VHS members & the space. Side benefit of lighting a fire under us to get things like tool lockouts and NFC access on all of our entrances, etc.
I started a git repo & a slack channel #vhs-tapkit
If you have interest or skills in this area come join!
Update on some related progress. I spent some time researching NFC reader chips best suited to our cards + phones, the NXP PN7150 is likely that candidate. NXP makes a devkit as a shield for Ardunio, Raspberry PI and BeagleBoneBlack - OM5578. I have a preference toward the Raspberry PI because of the feature/capability to price. Anyway, I ordered a few OM5578/PN7150RPI kits and put together a nodejs library to make reading cards super easy: GitHub - laftho/node-nfc-nci: nodejs api for linux NXP NFC NCI
Next I’m working on a nodejs SDK for the Nomos API to simplify authenticating/validating VHS NFC cards and will put together an example to post on the vhs/tapkit repo.