[quickthrowman]

Cooling for a card access system?

A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges.

There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from their customers.

[sofixa]

The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.

[quickthrowman]

There are card access systems that don’t require a computer, just a microcontroller. Perhaps if you need to integrate with multiple sites or a backend system for access control rules you can add computers, but card access systems are dead ass simple for a reason; they need to be reliable. The good systems that have computers still allow access in the event of a network failure.

Any access control system that fails in the event that it loses internet connectivity is poorly designed.

[mrguyorama]

>You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire

Actually in almost all products meant for real companies doing real work, this is an explicit design requirement.

Every cash register runs off of a computer that sits in a tiny metal oven with no cooling and is expected to run 24/7 without fail.

The difference between a tech gadget and a real world, real purpose appliance.

[anthk]

You must be young. We used to have handhelds and computers with no cooling at all.

[dgacmu]

I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink.

It started crashing during backups.

The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie) from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+ degree Celsius heat all the time - but SSDs don't mind, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive for a solid state one.

[dgacmu]

I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could well have been happening during read or write.

[ssl-3]

That is, in fact, exactly what we typically see in reality with local access control system head-ends.

At the doors, there might be keycards, biometrics and PINs (oh my!) happening.

But there's usually just not much going on, centrally. It doesn't take much to keep track of an index of IDs and the classes of things those IDs are allowed to access.

[trinix912]

You're saying that as if we never had Z80-based microcontrollers doing all this without problems. Complete with centralized control and all.