Alternative for Zipato Mini RFID keypad (sold out)

Hi there,

I have a couple of the Zipato Mini RFID keypads in use. I use them to lock/unlock my Home Assistant alarm system (Manual Alarm) via RFID tags.

The unique selling points for me are:

  • works on a battery, which keeps for > 1 year
  • completely wireless (connects via Z-Wave)
  • uses RFID tags, and (via a hack) can relay the tag used to arm/disarm the alarm to the Home Assistant frontend

Unfortunately, it seems these devices are sold out everywhere. Does anyone know of an alternative? I’m up to something homebrew, such as this one:


It would require some polishing, but most importantly it won’t work on a battery. Would there be a possibility to keep all hardware in deep sleep, only to awake when a button is pushed? What would the battery life of such a setup be? Any help is welcome!

Jan-Pascal

I’ve been in contact with Zipato. Their stock has also sold out. They tell me they’re working on a new model based on the 700 series Z-Wave chips, but it’s not out yet.

In the meantime, I’ve ordered a low-power esp32 board from ezsbc (https://www.ezsbc.com/index.php/products/wifi01-bat.html) with should be able to deep-sleep at 17µA. Combined with a PN532 RFID module, a 1000 mAh LiPo battery and some software this could be a serious alternative. Homebrew though, so I’ll have to make my own case and it will be bulkier and not so nice-looking as the Zipato keypad.

I’m working on a alternative hardware. Initial electrical design and firmware is done. I’ve started a github project to track the progress: https://github.com/janpascal/rfidpad

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Interested to hear if anybody else found a good alternative for Zipato. I am looking for a fingerprint/RFID house entry system to lock/unlock the house plus change home/away status of the kids.

Thanks!

Did you find a reasonable solution? I’m in the exact same boat of wanting to use RFID to trigger an unlock automation in HA.

No nothing yet…

How is your project moving along?

I was looking into this myself, but could not get any decent power usage while in deep sleep.

Hi,

The project had stalled due to lack of time. The ezsbc board (https://www.ezsbc.com/product/wifi01-cell10/) is pretty neat in deep sleep, but you need to power down the tag reader so that it doesn’t use any power either. The schematic in de GitHub project seemed to work well.