Doorcom

Buildings and doors

A building holds its doors, properties, residents, issues and documents. A door is one QR code, one dial code and one way of releasing a lock. A building can have as many doors as it likes: front door, car park gate, side entrance.

Buildings

Buildings in the sidebar is for owners. Each building has a name and a slug (used in /r/<slug>, the resident portal), an address, the landlord name and phone line for the poster, a timezone, quiet hours, the show-names switch for the bell grid, coordinates for sunset, a logo and an accent colour. The building page also shows the building's API token for the JSON API, with a button to issue a new one.

Deleting a building deletes everything in it. Owners switch between buildings with the select at the top of the sidebar; managers are pinned to their own.

The building page: name and slug, address, landlord, phone line, timezone, quiet hours, show names, coordinates, the logo upload and the API token

Doors

Doors lists each door with its release mode, dial code, the QR link and how many properties it rings. Adding a door needs only a name; everything else is on the door's page.

A door's page: name, dial code, ring timeout, enabled switch, release mode with the Access Controller fields, which properties it rings, and the deliveries and trades text
Name
Shown on the poster, the bell page and in every notification ("Front door: someone is ringing Property 12").
Dial code
Four to six digits, unique across the whole service. A caller on the building's phone line keys this in, then the property number, to ring the same residents. Two doors cannot share a code; the page says so if you try.
Ring timeout
Seconds the ring lasts before the visitor is offered the message form. 10 to 180; the default is the service-wide setting, 45.
Door enabled
Switch it off and the poster's QR shows "This door is switched off" instead of the bell grid. Rings are refused. Nothing else changes.
Which properties it rings
Tick the properties a door can reach. Nothing ticked means every property, including properties added later. A car park gate might ring only the ground floor, for example.
Deliveries text and trades text
When either has text, the bell page gets a Deliveries or Trades button that shows it. A Deliveries ring during quiet hours becomes a message instead of being refused.

What it takes to open a door

The poster, the bell page, the ringing, the calls, Telegram and the messages need nothing at the door but the sheet of paper. Opening the lock is the one part that needs hardware: a door controller, which is a small board wired to the lock release the building already has.

  • We supply it, at 100 GBP a door, installed. That is the board and the fitting, one a door, paid once; nothing monthly sits on top of it. A building that already has an Access Controller panel on the door does not need another board: Doorcom talks to the panel it has.
  • It needs Wi-Fi at the door that it can reach and stay on, and a mains supply. Plenty of front doors are at the bottom of a stairwell where the building's Wi-Fi is not: check the signal at the door itself, standing where the board will be, before the fitting rather than after.
  • Where there is no Wi-Fi, we supply a RUT241 router with a mobile eSIM in it instead: 130 GBP for the router, paid once, and 45 GBP a year per router for the data — one router often covers more than one door. An access point the building already owns is cheaper still, if one will reach that far.
  • An electrician fits it in about an hour, to the existing release. Doorcom never touches the lock itself; it asks the board or the panel to do what the button behind the desk does.
  • Ring only needs none of it. The phones still ring and somebody walks down. That is the right answer for a concierge desk, and for a building trying Doorcom before it commits to anything.

Release modes

Each door chooses how the lock is released when a resident opens.

Ring only (none)
Nothing is released. Rings, Telegram, calls and the log all work; the resident walks down, or a concierge lets the visitor in. Also the right mode while a board is being installed.
Access Controller (acs)
Doorcom posts to the Access Controller panel's release endpoint: {Access Controller URL}/api/doorphone/release with the bearer token and a JSON body of the Access Controller door id, who opened it, the ring id and the pulse length. Fill in the panel's URL, its token and the door id from that panel. The panel logs the opening as coming from Doorcom.
MQTT board (mqtt)
Reserved for boards talking straight to Doorcom's own broker without an Access Controller panel. The fields (board UID, channel) can be saved but this mode is not built in this version; a release in mqtt mode fails and is logged.

Pulse is how long the lock is released, in milliseconds (3000 by default). The visitor's Door open screen counts it down.

Testing the release

Test release on the door's page fires the release straight away, with no ring, and writes a "Test release" line in the call log with your username. If the Access Controller rejects it, the error is shown at the top of the page and logged. This is the way to check the URL, token and door id before a poster goes up.

Rotating a door code

The QR on the poster points at /d/<door code>, ten random characters. If a poster is photographed and shared somewhere it should not be, Rotate door code issues a new code: the old QR stops working at once, the dial code stays the same, and you print a new poster. The rotation is logged.

Deleting a door

Deleting a door removes its rings from the log as well. Disable it instead if you may want the history.