For years, moviegoers have debated whether or not Die Hard, director John McTiernan’s 1988 action film starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, is a Christmas story. But regardless of which side you favor in that eternal debate, most people who have seen the movie would likely agree that it’s exciting, amusing and eminently entertaining. There’s a reason it has spawned four sequels, a couple of them good.
The movie’s plot centers around a gang of thieves working for the deliciously malicious Hans Gruber (Rickman), who pretend to be terrorists so they can steal untraceable bearer bonds from a high-security vault inside Nakatomi Plaza. Police officer John McClane (Willis), intent on reuniting with his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) for the holiday, spends the bulk of the story covertly sneaking around the skyscraper barefoot, hoping to bring down the criminals and save some hostages, his spouse included. (The kid-friendly network-edited version is hilarious, by the way. Instead of an iconic obscenity starting with the word “mother,” McClane says “Yippee-ki-yay, Mister Falcon.”)
To access that vault, the thieves must first bypass multiple security layers, the first of which requires using an access card to get inside. A recent article posted at Hackster.io detailed how one enterprising Die Hard fan, Robert Wallhead, set out to recreate that access card using modern-day technology. While the characters never mention onscreen how the card works, those watching the movie for the first time now might naturally assume it employs radio frequency identification, since RFID has become well-known tech in the 35 years since the film’s release, and the fictional card seems to function in pretty much the same way that real-world RFID access cards do.
Wallhead posted about the prop at Hackaday.io, explaining what led him to undertake such a project: “Inspired by last year’s annual Christmas movie re-watch, and a desire to do some scratch-build modelling, I’m building the RFID reader from the vault in Die Hard. It will be semi-interactive, using a real RFID reader to turn on the lights.” Here’s a quick video of the card as it appeared in the movie, alongside Wallhead’s prop replica.
As the Hackster article explained, the prop replica didn’t need to open or unlock anything to match how it operated in the movie, but rather simply flash a red light. Thus, Wallhead was able to keep the electronic components simple when constructing it so that it would light up whenever he scanned his homemade card. As he wrote at Hackaday:
I’m using [Adafruit] NeoPixel LED strip clones for the lighting so I can tune the colour, brightness and fade durations easily in code (and this is the first time I’ve used them). The main controller is a [Raspberry] Pi Pico, also the first time I’ve used one, and this is the first time I’ve used MicroPython in anger. The chassis is 1mm thick ABS modelling sheet (known as “styrene” in the US), with a contact cement for most of the gluing and spots of CA glue for some extra reinforcing. Inside I overlaid some aluminum ducting tape to help block bleed-through.
A couple of glued-in ABS M3 nuts/spacers allows for reassembly as needs. For the OPEN display, it’s just a hand-drawn piece of paper behind a stack of acrylic plates. I’m aiming for as close to movie-accurate as I can be, with the illumination delay and fade duration synchronized to the movie as close as possible. For the logo, I hand-drew a vector diagram based on screenshots and it will be cutout of vinyl for the front of the box and the RFID card. Whilst I suspect the audience for a rebuild of this is pretty small, please let me know if I can share more info to help you with your version.
“As far as prop replicas go, this is an unusual choice,” the Hackster article noted. “The access card reader in Die Hard isn’t a particularly iconic prop, and many people won’t even recognize it.” And okay, that may be true. The movie, after all, is most fondly remembered for the scene-stealing interactions between Rickman and Willis, the high-octane action sequences, the walkie-talkie friendship between McClane and Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), and Gruber’s extremely quotable sidekick Theo (Clarence Gilyard), not to mention the great sequel starring Jeremy Irons and Samuel L. Jackson.
Nonetheless, as someone who watched the original Die Hard far too many times during my college years, I smiled in recognition the moment I saw photos of the movie-accurate RFID prop replica. Yippee-ki-yay, Mister Wallhead. Welcome to the party, pal.
Rich Handley has been the managing editor of RFID Journal since 2005. Outside the RFID world, Rich has authored, edited or contributed to numerous books about pop culture. You can contact Rich via email.