Hello everyone! We are group A5 (Alex Li, Michael Chen, Alex Xu) and we are currently working on a project called HoverLock. Our project idea is basically using NFC technology (something sort of similar to Bluetooth or RFID) in phones to be able to unlock locked doors. With just a hover of your phone, the NFC reader and the lock terminal will interact, and the terminal will correctly authenticate the user or maintain the lock if the user doesn’t have the right credentials. We got our idea from Apple Pay, which is a pretty popular payment system where customers can just tap their phone to a payment terminal and the payment would go through. We wanted to do something similar to the lock system for doors, effectively making unlocking doors a lot faster and seamless. Besides speed and convenience, we also wanted to make it a goal to have our prototype be secure and marketable, so people would actually be willing to use it.
We expect to use an NFC reader for our lock terminal, which means we would only need to process the information from the NFC reader through a Raspberry Pi. We will be building the lock system including motorizing a deadbolt lock and connecting the Raspberry Pi to a web server (for authentication purposes). The phone and the NFC reader would interact, and information is authenticated in the Raspberry Pi, triggering a motor to unlock or do nothing.
Our project proposal describes an initial design using a camera and facial recognition technology instead of NFC. We realized this would have too many security and speed issues, so we pivoted to the NFC idea. Everything in the project proposal slides is relevant except we replace the camera and facial recognition with an NFC reader.
Project Proposal: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EV785WM7kQUi_hsCS9XF-ETQ25k-Rp5TGLilCU5PcmI/edit?usp=sharing