Creating Your Own RFID Integration (API)

In order to have Cobot work with your own RFID reader and verify member access, you will need to link it to Cobot with our API.

The Basics

Here are some basic instructions on how the integration should be set up. If you have questions, don't hesitate to have your programmer reach out to us!

1. The reception desk will register new cards using the manage check-in tokens app.
2. You will link your RFID door reader to verify based on the member access token from our API.
3. Then, when a member uses the RFID reader, they will automatically be checked in to Cobot if they have a successful check-in request and the door (from step 2) will open.
4. If they don't have an active token, they just get a response with a 204 status and an empty body, and the door will remain locked.

The Full Instructions

Cobot offers various APIs to integrate with access control systems. Depending on the capabilities of the access control device, the integration can either do live requests or it has to fall back to periodically synchronize member data from Cobot with the access control system.

Live requests

The reader device actively asks Cobot to approve each check-in request. This allows you to base the decision on letting someone in or not on live data, e.g. if a member have enough valid time passes to come in.

When a member signs up, their RFID card needs to be scanned once to register it. The result of the scan (some kind of token) is sent to Cobot via the check-in token endpoint.

Whenever a member wants to access the space, the reader device needs to send a check-in request to Cobot. See Check-in API » "Subsequent check-ins."

Sync member data

Member data is synchronized to the reader device periodically, in case the device does not support live requests.

You still have to associate the token/hash from the reader with each member, which you can do as in the "live requests" scenario, or store it in a custom field via the custom fields API or the web interface.

To push Cobot members to your device, pull all members via the memberships API, plus either their check-in tokens or custom fields, depending on where you stored the reader numbers.

Afterwards, assemble everything into a format the reader device understands and copy it over.