Re: Attendance/Scheduling Software
 

I wonder if an automated tool that tracked the times MAC addresses are/were within range of a WiFi router or two, might be a good automated method for keeping track of the warm bodies near a team's meetings?

It would depend on
- expecting students to always be accompanied by a wifi transceiver (a phone, pad, and/or laptop) (not such a bad assumption)
- expecting students to be reluctant to cheat by giving their transceiver(s) to someone else, or by building a special device that would transmit their MAC(s)
- associating students with their current and future transceivers' MACs
- getting the students to have their transceivers turned on long enough to satisfy the team's bedchecking goals
- maybe getting the students to trigger an interaction between their transceiver(s) and the routers (I can't remember if that would happen automatically, by default) (i.e. get the students to attempt to connect with the LAN the router(s) create(s))

I think a relatively painless, 90% automated, inexpensive, attendance tracking system could be build this way; if someone were motivated to do it. The effort would be in developing the user-interface and other interfaces. The detector and transceivers already exist, are already installed, and are well-understood.

Blake

Re: Attendance/Scheduling Software
 

Interesting idea, Blake. Sure, phones/tablets/laptops would automatically connect to a known SSID when in range, but they can only connect to one network at a time, and presumably other networks in range (like a school wide wifi network) may take precedence for the device (either due to precedence settings within the device, or because they were already connected to that network when they came within range) and thus provide inaccurate results. Your wifi router would also need to be connected to the internet, otherwise people would have to be constantly manually connecting/disconnecting when they needed to get online. The good news is that you can easily find an existing router that will maintain connection logs, and you could easily write a small service to log into the router and parse them. Set it up on a cron job and you're all set.

It might be better to use bluetooth instead of wifi - you can have multiple bluetooth devices connected to a phone at the same time, and it won't risk killing the phone's default internet connection. Position it near the entry door so everyone would automatically connect (after they set it up as a recognized device) as they walked into/out of the build space. Your software would then just have to be intelligent enough to detect first/last connections, recognizing that someone may connect a dozen times or more during a meeting as they move around the build space and come within range of the device.

Re: Attendance/Scheduling Software
 

I feel like this is a case of having a solution and trying to engineer a problem to fit it. Its a really cool idea, but it is way more complicated than necessary.

Re: Attendance/Scheduling Software
 

From my end of things, not so much. The problem description definitely came before the solution; and the desire to eliminate forcing most users to remember to cooperate with the system is the motivation.

By putting a WiFi AP or similar device into a promiscuous mode, I think someone could capture all nearby WiFi traffic (or come close enough) and extract MAC addresses from that traffic. I wouldn't bet my life on it, but I think that doing that would get past the roadblocks Jon described.

However, to save power, and to burnish my tinfoil hat credentials, I frequently turn off my phone's WiFi when I don't need it. Anyone with WiFi turned off would slip through the cracks (and that takes us back to asking users to remember to cooperate with the attendance tracking system...).

Blake