 Welcome YouTube. Welcome YouTube. Tom here from Orange Systems and Unify has sent me a Unify door access system. Now no I don't usually review door access systems and no I've not deployed any of these in production but I think they have a clever product here that was worth looking at. So when Unify reached out to me said would you like to review this and fold this closer they sent me this I did not pay for this. I said sure because I like the way that they have done interfaces on some other technologies such as networking I think they have an interface that makes it a little bit easier to use and they're seemingly bringing some of that same design over to the door access which kind of makes a system that's easy for end users to use but still requires some skill to deploy it didn't have the best instructions but that's what this review is about to kind of walk you through the process talk about my likes and don't likes but before we dive into all that let's first feel like to learn more about me and my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com if you like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top if you like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.larnesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content and one of the things I want to get out of the way right up front so this is their unified door access reimagined unified access system and the requirement that it only can work with a UDM pro is my first major problem with this system I really wish Unify would have launched this product with support for more than just the UDM pro in the rack over here out of view is the UDM pro above it you see a Unify and VR which is driving the cameras behind us if they would have integrated it into the protect system that would be amazing it seems like they should have done that I just want to you know express my concern maybe somebody Unify is listening I imagine at some point in the future they will release more support for this but the Unify Dream Machine pro to me is such a basic device it doesn't have the use case of a lot of our clients it just doesn't have enough features so we just don't push it we don't really sell a lot of it that being said to buy one just to integrate into this seems kind of like an annoyance that I really wish they would have solved prior to launch and let's talk about what this system costs so we have 499 for this Unify access starter kit that's what we have here one access hub so for each door you need a hub then we have a access card reader pro access card reader light and Unify access cards 20 count and good news is they're using standard NFC which I'll demonstrate here in a minute that allows you to use more than just their cards so you can use their cards or you can use third-party stuff we'll get into that in a minute the Unify access reader light kind of basic and that's this device right here it does the job and works and beeps to let you know something worked or I see if I can get it to these cards here show you a different card that's not registered blinks kind of red it's got a little light behind here so that's an unregistered card sound versus a registered card sound novel cool and expensive the other one it comes with is the Unify access reader pro and that's the one here this is a touchscreen display not much you can do with the touchscreen there is an admin panel on it so you can touch it and get into the admin on there and put a username password kind of neat it blinks it displays the picture of different things on there and as I said both of these support the if you use a third-party NFC so this is a really cool device and that little camera at the top and someone's gonna point out hey isn't that another product that Unify tried releasing before yeah I'll leave a link to that I don't really know what happened to the front row product line and Chris mentioned it and Christian crosstalk solutions mentioned this whole device set up in his video as well and talks a little bit about the front row which was some other live camera thing that you would wear and this was the form factor that it was in so they suck a PoE on the back and plugged it in here all right back to the unified door access so the requirements for this are going to be well the starter kit or if you want to buy these individually for each door you do need the Unify access hub but one Unify Dream Machine Pro will run multiple door hubs so this is kind of a nice feature of it and I'll get to the adoption and how these get set up in a minute but essentially pretty straightforward adoption method so they were actually really easy to configure and set up and that's one of the advantages Unify has is making these essentially without a ton of documentation or manual easy to set up and deploy which is great because the quick start guide yeah here you go here's your quick start guide it's just not extensive there's not a lot on here so good news is I figured it all out but the other side of that is if you're depending on your electronics savviness and your understanding of how door access system works the manual you just flip through all of it right now there's not an absolute ton of documentation they do have some sample topologies and set up on here you know what you need and how you want to configure it here all right now I didn't do an unboxing and I'll reference and leave a link to a Christian cross-talks video but box yeah it's nice things are well packaged and secure inside of here it's got different mounts for both the devices that they shipped with it including this so you'd have to do like a you know drill this out it's got a little holder if you want to put this next to your door for the access so that's cool there's also little magnets in a box did hold it closed like said packaging a plus on that no problems there I've just not big on unboxing and what's in the box to me is what's most relevant part of this now when you go set this up it's go into your dream machine pro you load the access software and then you plug all the devices in and they start showing up in here matter of fact under elements is where you see all the devices and they have a dashboard in here and you can see all the times it was swiping like right here you can see who swiped and then have a picture or a camera because I was facing the studio camera that's the view you're getting right here and usually was looking at the ceiling while I was goofing and playing with it and yeah pretty neat the way all this works and even though we got the studio lights on it actually sees quite well like that wonderful picture of my finger when I'm trying to set it up and hold it down I think there's all kinds of times I was looking down on it and you can see all the little icons I like the way because I have the octopus in here it's got the octopus icons the Lucina icons and you can just mouse over these so from an interface standpoint great as far as adopting the elements yeah they show up on adopted then you adopt them in there and then it has the topology which is kind of cool because you say here's the unified dream machine pro their studio door first floor you can name these whatever you want we just I'm in the studio I called it studio door and then we have the different devices that are attached to that and these are all collapsible so if you had this group together so you have one dream machine but a series of door access controllers and then you would be able to talk to or see visually how each one of these is attached and they do have the option so these are currently both set up to be for entry but you can choose whether these are at the entry or exit side of a door and the reason you do that is because if you needed someone to scan in scan out you could have them scan in so you the door unlocks and scan out so you set the method by which these are set up and then you can create all the groupings and access controls around that now things I didn't see despite all the access logs they have is I didn't see any activity reports I bring it up because if you were to use this or if you view some of the really high-end door access control systems what you'll end up with if people swipe in and out they can give you like current count of people that are in a room this many people swiped in this many people swiped out and of course there's even real advanced systems that watch for tailgating and watch the headcount so how many people go through this is not quite that advanced it's somewhat basic but then again some of those really advanced systems are actually a little bit pricey this is a good in between despite not having all of that extra functionality in there and then you can jump right to the captures of course this is only with the pro reader model and to scroll through captures because maybe you want to know who swiped and we have which NFC card swiped on here and which one was you know what view it had so was it actually Tom or is it someone with Tom's card that came through do Lucina come through or someone with Lucina's card come through and I thought this is a you know easy way to do this for so for basic access and having you know being able to jump backwards a few weeks to look at who accessed what pretty intuitive this like I said from an end user standpoint was pretty easy to go through the logs and figure out how all this works now here's all the users are in here and what does it take to add another user it's actually really simple you can go here and add a user and assign them to an existing card you can import users via CSV or we can start with the card and add the card and then add to the user and let's kind of walk through that process it's actually pretty straightforward and we'll go ahead and let's get another user and we're going to go ahead and unassign their card and delete it so I just reuse the same card again so here we go we're going to go put this essentially in add mode now to put this in add mode we just go to add card we choose which reader that we want to do this with we're going to select this one here can be done with either one and it's going to make it in reader mode so it will assign someone tap card here more than five seconds and that's it it's now popped up over here we can now say new user assigned to new user or existing user I could type a username and assign it them or we can say existing user and we'll put it back just give them their same card back we've assigned it done we've now pushed that back over there so now if we scan that person again why did it do that you're wondering that's because I'm doing this in real time there seems to be a roughly 30 second or so delay from the time you push a setting in here before it reaches these devices I bring that up because it doesn't tell you this it just save there's not any type of progress it says wait 30 seconds so just be patient with 30 seconds and it works another user so we're back to having that user assigned and this same process works for third party cards so the third party cards they have here and one of them is going to be this is NFC have taped to the bottom of an octopus as we go here and pretty straightforward there so let me look at the overhead again and show you what this looks like we look we have these little stickers I just got a held on with a piece of tape but this is a little NFC sticker these are programmable ones we have for completely unrelated to YouTube project that my staff is working on for putting stickers on things with NFC so we have these 3d printed octopuses and we just grabbed one of those and it worked then I said hey because of what that project related to I wonder if it works with these amiibo's which are part of the Nintendo switch platform and so had one of these it's Lucina and once again it says her name a little bit wrong but it does say Lucina so these have NFC tags in them as well so you can actually assign and I think this is a way cooler thing if you don't want to get the unified cards you can get a bunch of amiibo's or whatever or program your own NFC's or I'm sure and I don't know exactly I think they have the standard it works with you they have like NFC rings they have all kinds of things so this kind of makes door access fun and I'm happy to say that it doesn't just work with the unified cards because well that opens up that much more opportunity now a little bit about the setup here and what you're looking at which my little lights fell over the way the door access system functions and so the demo we have here is this 12 volt LED light this fluke meter sitting at 12 volts this is show you that it's a 12 volt output for the mag lock and the way this works and if you're not familiar with door access systems you have a couple different options over here and actually it's probably easier because this is small I'm gonna pull it up in the documentation and we'll start with the input relays you have request to enter request to exit door position center remote release now what these are is request to exit is when you sometimes have a button by a door so you can hit it and it lets you unlock the door and releases the mag lock request to enter is sometimes where someone buzzes you in so someone comes in to get buzzed in and you have someone at the door and it goes yeah I'm gonna let you in it's the button and then same thing like the remote release and door position sensor now these can also be controlled with as I understand but this is a little outside of my expertise in door access systems you can put motion control systems on here and some of these are required on the doors so when you come into a door you know you swipe in to get into a building but what if there's a event like a fire that has to let you out of the building you want to be able to go through that door rather quickly you can have motion sensors on the door or even the door strikers where you push those and it releases the mag lock from the inside now output relay with no power or outright output relay with 12 volt DC we're actually using specifically to 12 volt DC output now one of those things this lights being on because it powers until someone hits the button and allows them out so either as a pause and you can set the delay for how long that pauses but it's doing is when it releases power that would also release the mag lock now all this is powered via in a requirement as well as PoE plus plus and so your network switch has to have PoE plus plus in order to get all these devices working because these work in pass through of this now something of note you do not have to have a unified switch and I can verify that because purposely I stuck this on an Aruba switch I had just to make sure that it worked with non-unify so if you already have existing infrastructure and it's not unified yeah as long as this PoE plus plus it should work perfectly fine so that's just an important thing to note and remember also what if it loses communication what happens well first problem is going to be this of course you notice how the light went out and the voltage went out well that means if we lose power the door fails open there's ways around that by doing different types of relay setups where you can have it and as I understand I'm not an expert at this it will go ahead and fail closed but that also means no one can swipe or do anything so they can create different problems but if it does fail when if by losing power it's going to release the mag lock but please note even though it's not booted yet and these are in boot mode and this is still booting up and not adopted you saw all the lights blinking here you notice as soon as I plugged it in the light came on so soon as it gets power not when it boots up it automatically sends power to the 12 volt system when sending power to the 12 volt system it then will allow even this right here which is some momentary context which matter of fact it's a power button for a PC it'll allow that button to work but until these get talking to the controller and get everything going again they're not quite ready for communicating and swiping cards but I did all this in real time on purpose because now this one is ready this one boots up really fast this one boots up I didn't start the stopwatch but it goes go back in a video still reasonably fast I would say that's less than 30 seconds and it's ready to swipe again when you have it reading properly give it a second here still not reading so it does take a few extra seconds even though it says it's ready apparently it's not ready until this is finished booting up so this part's booting even though this is talking unless you let's look over to the software here yeah I can talk to these but it's not talking to this yet so soon as this turns completely live and I'm not editing this part I'm doing this all in real time so you can kind of get an idea that yeah it takes a second if you reboot this before everything starts communicating alright and hey there we go so it well that was a good maybe minute and a half I'm thinking I guess I didn't have a stopwatch started before that started working but so now it's working again and it's working so it does the full thing where it will unlock the door everything's communicating etc now let's try something else this is not a question that some people had asked and I was curious about as well what happens if you lose network communication not power obviously we know power means fail open and the configuration I have but if I disconnect this network cable we're going to lose communication between the UDM here the unified access so now they are no longer connected but the switch it still has power and how does that work well this is actually something that was pretty simple I kind of expected this behavior so even though this is you know down once again all this is real time I didn't edit this this is down no communication the last remembered cards are all in there so while I can't add or remove any cards pay they so completely function and that's actually kind of a nice feature of this is the cards keep working and I find it interesting because obviously the voice control systems are all working without communication back to the UDM so that's a pretty important aspect I think in my fact let's swipe in the octopus as well so we did that now in a plug network connectivity back in and switch back over here it's going to take a second and something because I've already tested this I already know happens once this gets reconnected the last one we had swiped was the octopus so as soon as this gets communication again it's going to pull logs from it so it does continue to log events even if it loses communication with the controller and there we are here's all those logs coming back into there now what I don't know what I didn't do extensive testing in how many logs will fill up prior to that I know it handles a few I don't know how many swipes it will handle before it runs out of log space but I'll go with an assumption there's a decent amount of log space in there but it's not something I really have time to test but my overall thoughts on this I you know testing it everything seems to work everything was really really obviously relatively intuitive to set up I like the interface I think it's something you can give to end users some you know admin level people without having a deep level technical skill and go hey manage this system and you know add users remove users swipe a card everything was like I walked through on here pretty straightforward to do but that big hang-up I have still is the Unify NVR not being supported on here because that would be ideal so now if you want to sell someone a unified protect system with a few cameras and integrate with their door access system and tie it all together that would be great the you know I don't know why they chose to only have the UDM Pro which is the one thing that's really bothering me about this product and I just want to throw that out there that I guess if you already have a unified Dream Machine Pro and you're really liking it because you just don't need any advanced features that aren't offered on it and it does fit for you and we know plenty of people like that awesome this is kind of a cool add-in for a relatively inexpensive door access system once you don't have to buy the UDM Pro if you're looking for a system that is all self-hosted and doesn't send data to the cloud etc as I know that is our niche take cover that's another nice feature of this is that except when you sign up for the UDM Pro that does require you to register with the ubiquity account and things like that so once again even though this doesn't seem to require any sign up for the cloud it did require me to register to UDM Pro with the cloud when I set it up so this kind of does as well but my overall thoughts on it I hope they keep developing this platform and I hope it keeps moving forward because I like to see you know technology that has a nicer interface on it because some of the other commercial door access system that I've dealt with have been less than intuitive really ugly old windows applications that look like they did when I first started working in tech and I used to deal with some of the really old door swipe systems they didn't seem to have improved some of them that much but hey it's way forward it's pretty cool and I'll leave links to where you can buy all this at Unify I don't think there's any Amazon links for that I seen at this time where they can be bought all this is purchased directly from Unify alright thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit 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