Welcome Center

Build Logs
1

We’re looking at rebuilding the welcome center so its part of how you get into the hackerspace. This means it’s going to live outside now and be part of a guest welcome process.

@nogthree has offered up a really nice 15-17" touchscreen with a great metal bezier. We’re going to put an rfid reader on it for members, with some kind of microcontroller and a pc and throw the lot in a box of some kind.

Also in the box, we’re going to throw a webcam of some kind and a label printer. Why you ask? Because we want to print guest passes and keep the doors closed at all times. This is part of the swipe-in, swipe-out changes we’re making overall.

If you’re a guest on a tuesday, the center will ask you for your name and email and print you out a 6x10cm sticker that will look something like this:

202f5e18ae71c518.png2362×1417

That qr code will be based on your email. It will let us track repeat guests (so long as they don’t keep changing their email, not a huge concern. less of a concern if we disallow the + sign in emails). It will also let us easily spot newbies visually in the crowd.

If we’re recording the email addresses, we can follow up on people a little bit of time past their last visit and ask them why they stopped coming or didn’t become a member, valuable feedback.

So we have everything I think except for the printer, labels and camera.

My suggestion is this printer and stickers:

As a bit of an aside, we could expose this little label printer to the network which means we can do cool stuff like print qr code stickers for wiki pages that you can stick on stuff to help document it.

If you have a webcam around the place you can donate, please throw it my way or to @rut4ger.

@rut4ger is managing the build as far as I am aware, as part of the door. I’ll be throwing together some code for it.

Re code, I’m going to build it in php/html/css/javascript because thats my hammer and its easy for people to hack on. Here’s a html5 qrcode library http://dwa012.github.io/html5-qrcode/. I’m thinking of adapting this for input unless theres a compelling argument for installing a real keyboard: https://github.com/Mottie/Keyboard

I’ll let @rut4ger talk about where it will sit, the enclosure etc.

2 Likes
2

Will it be keeping the existing features with the front door … ie that it displays details of a person’s membership and also optionally plays a tune when they swipe?
I’m happy to explain hiw these work to anyone who cares… or u can just read the code!

3

Yep I’ll be trying to keep those existing features.

4

Just want to give credit where credit’s due, @Thermoelectric donated the screen way back when we were at the old premises. I’ve just been sitting on it for this exact project.