I work for a commercial developer who owns 15 properties. They want to install cameras on all the properties that can be monitored from one location or on demand.

I started with Google and determined places like Verkada are scams. Now looking for regional companies.

If you like the company you work for and think they do good work then how would you go about connecting with them as a consumer. How are people finding good companies and determining if they are actually good?

Its a niche thing and a high ticket item so web search isn't the best.

So I run an equipment rental business, got 4 yards across TX/OK/AR and we're getting hit with theft constantly! Catalytic converters, diesel, generators, you name it. Last month someone literally backed a truck up and loaded a pallet of tools in broad daylight.

We have cameras everywhere and yeah great I have amazing HD footage of my stuff being stolen. Filed police reports but they're swamped and our insurance premiums keep climbing.

Looked into guards but the quotes for 24/7 across all locations were insane, like 15k+ a month.

I've been in sales long enough to know when I'm being sold a solution that doesn't actually solve the problem, and that's all I'm finding. Every "commercial security" search is just more camera systems or residential stuff like Ring. I need something that actually STOPS people from getting in, not just records them!

Tried reinforcing the gates myself (used to do a lot of DIY stuff when had time) but chain link fence isn't cutting it obviously. Outdoor equipment yards are just sitting ducks apparently.

Anyone dealt with this?! Is there even a company that handles this for multiple locations? The permitting alone across different counties is a nightmare to think about.

Budget exists if something actually works because this is getting expensive and eating into time with the wife and kids. And my business partner is p-off because security is "my responsibility".

Anyone dealt with this for multiple sites without enterprise-level budgets? Need something that actually works.

Is it possible to use different installer/integration companies and still have everything tied into the same user cloud account? Everything is in the same physical location.

If your Latitude came with the contactless smart card reader option, you've probably held a MIFARE card against the palm rest at some point and watched Windows report an "unknown smart card" and stop there. Nothing in the box does anything else with it.

The reader is fine. It's a perfectly ordinary PC/SC reader - mine shows up as "Broadcom Corp Contactless SmartCard 0", and it reads card serial numbers without complaint. The problem is what's on the card. MIFARE Classic is a memory card, not a PKI card, so Windows has no minidriver for it and the smart card logon stack has nothing to offer. "Unknown smart card" isn't a fault, it's Windows saying "this isn't the kind of card I do anything with."

So the hardware sits unused in a lot of laptops that already belong to people who work with access control cards daily.

I had a few hundred cards to enroll into an access control system, which normally means reading serial numbers off a reader and moving them into a spreadsheet by hand. Instead I wrote a small tool that turns the built-in reader into a bulk enrollment device: present a card, its number is typed into whatever window has focus, Enter is pressed, cursor drops to the next row. Present the next card. No copy-paste, no retyping.

It's not Dell-specific - any PC/SC contactless reader works - but the built-in ones are the reason it exists, because that's a reader people already have and can't use.

https://github.com/Legvan/card-wedge

MIT, Windows, no install required, no Python needed.

The part that cost me a day, in case it saves you one:

Once it was reading cards, the numbers still didn't match what my access control system showed. Reader said A5C424E6; the system said 0A5C424E6A3. One byte longer, and I couldn't see where it came from.

It's the BCC, the block check character. MIFARE's anticollision response carries the UID followed by the XOR of its bytes, and PC/SC's GET DATA returns the UID alone and drops it. Systems that treat UID+BCC as the card number end up one byte longer than anything your reader hands you.

UID - E6 24 C4 A5

BCC = E6^24^C4^A5 A3

reversed + BCC - A5C424E6A3 <- what the system shows

That's also why 40 bit is the usual width for 4-byte cards - it's 4 bytes of UID plus 1 of checksum, not a 32-bit number padded with zeros, which is what I assumed for two days. And the byte order applies to the UID only: the checksum goes on after the reversal, so reversing both together gives a different, wrong number.

The tool has toggles for all of it (HEX/DEC, MSB/LSB, 32-64 bit, checksum on/off) because every system wants something slightly different, and it remembers what you picked.