Attendance/Scheduling Software

[gblake]

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