A prototype for an easy to user tool and equipment lending tool for open workshops, collectives and fablabs
An often encountered problem in open workshops such as ours, is that many people visit us and want to borrow tools, especially during events. Handling that with sprawling excel sheets or even worse, paper was no longer an option. With this we aim to create a tool which enables us to electronically lend tools or equipment to users. This works by first making inventory of all our stuff and afterwards sticking the automatically generated barcodes to all tools. We can than register users with 125 kHz RFID chips. They can than scan all the tools they want to borrow and enter an expected return date. Afterwards they can checkout their cart with either their chip or a username/password combination.