Business Avenue · Access control

The door that decides locally.

A white-labeled, offline-first door-access appliance for meeting rooms — designed, cased, programmed and deployed by PearlFibers. When the network drops, the door keeps working.

Client: Business Avenue
Sector: Access control
Delivered: 2026 · deployed
Services: Custom hardware & IoT · Automation

The door-access kit — touchscreen tablet appliance, controller unit and magnetic lock

Pi 5Raspberry Pi 5 at the core

7"touchscreen kiosk

39automated device tests

0network needed to open a booked door

The problem

Business Avenue bills meeting rooms by reservation — so the door itself has to honor bookings: open for the person who reserved the hour, stay shut otherwise, and log what happened.

Off-the-shelf access control couldn't speak to the reservation system, and anything cloud-dependent fails exactly when Iraq's connectivity does. A door that stops working during an outage isn't access control — it's a locked-out client with a paid booking.

What we built

A purpose-built appliance: a Raspberry Pi 5 with a 7-inch touchscreen in a custom case at the door, driving a relay-controlled magnetic lock, with a USB RFID reader for cards and on-screen reservation codes for guests.

The software is the point: a Python device service makes every open/deny decision locally against a synced SQLite cache, so the door works through network and power interruptions — then reconciles with the Business Avenue backend when the connection returns.

✓ Offline-first: local decisions, sync/events/heartbeat loops when online
✓ RFID cards for members, reservation codes for guests
✓ SvelteKit kiosk UI served by the device itself
✓ Custom-designed case and UPS unit — the door survives power cuts
✓ Paired to the management dashboard, updated over the air
✓ Hardened kiosk provisioning via Ansible and systemd
✓ 39 automated tests on the device service

The outcome

Meeting-room doors at Business Avenue now enforce the reservation calendar by themselves — no receptionist with a key, no cloud dependency, no dispute about who was in the room.

The appliance is white-labeled and designed for fleets: pairing, provisioning and updates are built for many doors, not one. Today it ships as PearlAccess — our access-control hardware product — with this fleet as its reference deployment.

How it works

The decision path never leaves the door: kiosk and RFID feed the local service, which drives the lock from its offline cache — the backend is for sync, not permission.

From the real system

Public surfaces and admin views, shown with the client's permission — and never with anyone's personal data.

Inside the appliance case — touchscreen, controller board and RFID coil — Inside the door unit: display, compute and RFID coil in the custom enclosure.

Exploded view of the appliance electronics and casing layers — The enclosure is ours too — designed for the hardware, not adapted to it.

The companion UPS unit in a white casing — The companion UPS: a door that decides locally must also stay powered locally.

The complete kit — tablet appliance, controller and magnetic lock — The full kit as it ships to a branch: appliance, controller, lock.

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