A keycard lock is a lock operated by a keycard, a flat, rectangular plastic card with identical dimensions to that of a credit card or American and EU driver's license which stores a physical or digital signature which the door mechanism accepts before disengaging the lock.
There are several popular type of keycards in use including the mechanical holecard, bar code, magnetic stripe, Wiegand wire embedded cards, smart card (embedded with a read/write electronic microchip), and RFID proximity cards.
Keycards are frequently used in hotels as an alternative to mechanical keys.
The first commercial use of key cards was at automated parking lots to raise and lower the gate where users paid a monthly fee.
Famous quotes containing the word lock:
“There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summertime because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)