paper: Beach Cities Robotics Clock In System

[tr6scott]

Thanks, works great and was easy to set up.

One question, or request, or feature request....
I have it set up on an old laptop, and have it logging into and starting the workbook on boot. Question is that zoom level is automatically set to 119% and seems to be forced in the macros somewhere. For the laptop, I need to set the zoom to something closer to 80% to be full screen. Can you send me a clue, on where I can edit that in the macro, I did a quick scan, and did not see it.

As for the feature request, if this was made a variable from the team configuration sheet, that would others, and make it a little more user friendly.

[kaliken]

I will let Andrew know about the request as he did the amazing job of setting it all up. As for changing the zoom level, I am not sure exactly where it would be hard coded.

I am glad people are using the system. The clock in system even though it seems like a tough work place type of thing, has really helped us in identifying students who have put a lot of time into the year. In addition it has given us a good understanding of the amount of hours it really takes to build a robot! Since Andrews first version of the software in 2009/2010 We have logged tens of thousands of hours!

Also as an update, one of our other mentors, Peter, did a mass overhaul on our sign in system over the summer. We have now ported it to Python and tied it to our team database system for team registration and contact. If we find the time (we meaning Peter) we can upload it to CD though I am not sure how difficult it would be to remove the hooks to our database.

[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by kaliken

Also as an update, one of our other mentors, Peter, did a mass overhaul on our sign in system over the summer. We have now ported it to Python and tied it to our team database system for team registration and contact. If we find the time (we meaning Peter) we can upload it to CD though I am not sure how difficult it would be to remove the hooks to our database.

The Python sign in system is available on GitHub: https://github.com/team294/signinapp. It runs on both Windows and Linux as a PyQt application. Currently it's written to use Python 3 but I'll probably update it soon so it can run on either 2 or 3.

As Ken mentioned, it is currently written to tie into our Django-based team database system (also on GitHub; https://github.com/team294/roster) to pull user information and photos and push timecard records. However, all of the database access code in the sign in application is localized to rosteraccess.py, so it should be fairly easy to adapt it to a different backend (e.g. reading/writing to CSV files).

[tr6scott]

Thanks we like excel, as I work in it everyday. When I don't have something else to learn, I will take a look. Thanks for sharing.

I have it working, this is what you need to do. I don't think CD will let me post the new workbook to this this thread. So this is what you need to do if you want to...

In the teams setup sheet, in the row under the "clock out credit" in R9C1 enter the text, "Zoom Level on Open" and in R9C2 enter the value you want, "80" for us.

Open up the VBA Macros (Ribbon bar, view, macros) select any macro click edit. When VBA opens up, on left pane, click "ThisWorkbook" then on the code window select "Open" from the dropdown list. [Another way is to use find, and search the whole project for "zoom"]

At the bottom of the window you will see:

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
    Sheet1.Activate
    ActiveWindow.Zoom = 119
    ActiveWindow.DisplayGridlines = False
    ActiveWindow.DisplayHeadings = False
    Application.DisplayFormulaBar = False
    'Application.DisplayFullScreen = True
End Sub

change the zoom value to:

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
    Sheet1.Activate
    ActiveWindow.Zoom = Sheet8.Cells(9, 2)
    ActiveWindow.DisplayGridlines = False
    ActiveWindow.DisplayHeadings = False
    Application.DisplayFormulaBar = False
    'Application.DisplayFullScreen = True
End Sub

Save and close, when you open the sheet next time it will zoom to the value stored in team setup sheet.

[Bob Steele]

I got a copy of this two years ago from your team.
We didn't get a chance to put it in place last year but are working on it right now. With over 60 student members on the team and an additional 15 mentors, we have a bottle neck at the old sign in sheet.

We are attempting to put our Classmate to this use. We retired it as something to use on the field the year we got it...
I will keep you posted about whether it will handle it.

thanks again!!

[akeisic]

Glad to see the interest in the sheet. I just uploaded v2.01 with an extra option on the Team Setup tab to set the opening zoom level.

As Ken and Peter have mentioned, it's made life so much easier. We now have students who won't leave unless others do as well to keep his/her hours above others. After using it for a couple years now and have now integrated the sign in application with our team information database. See Peter's post above. It's a bit more work to setup though.

Keep the suggestions coming as the FIRST community is now the driver for more improvements.

[Brandon Holley]

We really love the check-in system you guys have put together and are attempting to implement it currently.

For some reason we are having issues reading the barcodes with our barcode scanner we purchased. We did follow the instructions and copied the font into the windows font folder. Excel and the barcode scanner will scan various barcodes we have laying around with no issue (like the barcode for the serial# on our Dell desktops). However, with a black and white printout from our printer, we are unable to get the scanner to register the codes.

Do you have any insight into this type of issue or any suggestions we may be able to try to correct it?

Thanks for the great program.

-Brando

[akeisic]

The first thing that comes to mind is to try a couple different background colors for the badge. If it's sufficiently dark enough, the bar code reader might be picking up the frame of the bar code box as opposed to the bar code itself.

Outside of that I can't think of any smoking gun solution.

Andrew

[This Guy]

This looks amazing!!! Team 4322 has been looking into something like this for the team and so far nothing even comes close to it. However, is there any way we can edit the badges or will we just have to make our own? I would like to change the background on them to 1 of 2 images for Students or Mentors/Parents, and is there a way to put our logo instead of just text? Or change the font of the team name?

[This Guy]

Originally Posted by This Guy

This looks amazing!!! Team 4322 has been looking into something like this for the team and so far nothing even comes close to it. However, is there any way we can edit the badges or will we just have to make our own? I would like to change the background on them to 1 of 2 images for Students or Mentors/Parents, and is there a way to put our logo instead of just text? Or change the font of the team name?

Nevermind, after skimming through the code I was able to fine the comment with a password.

[Dwight_2]

Originally Posted by This Guy

Nevermind, after skimming through the code I was able to fine the comment with a password.

Where did you find the password?
My team is also looking into a solution like this and would like to put our team logo on the badges instead of text.

[This Guy]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

We really love the check-in system you guys have put together and are attempting to implement it currently.

For some reason we are having issues reading the barcodes with our barcode scanner we purchased. We did follow the instructions and copied the font into the windows font folder. Excel and the barcode scanner will scan various barcodes we have laying around with no issue (like the barcode for the serial# on our Dell desktops). However, with a black and white printout from our printer, we are unable to get the scanner to register the codes.

Do you have any insight into this type of issue or any suggestions we may be able to try to correct it?

Thanks for the great program.

-Brando

We are having the same issue. For some reason Excel is adding a "Space" after the code ("*"+content+"*"). I haven't found a way to get rid of it.

[akeisic]

Let me check into the problem.
-Andrew

[tr6scott]

It may be an issue with the programming of the barcode reader too. The reader when scanned needs to send a <CR> character too. The barcode reader we used, you were able to program this behavior, by scanning barcodes in the manual.

We have used this program in the past, and that was the only issue we had.

When you scan the code, does the number show up in the excel data entry cell, and you just need to manually hit enter?

We used a Honeywell hand scanner purchased off of ebay for about $15.

Have you tried printing with a different printer? Maybe something with the black ink? See if a Laser print out of the badges works?

[marshall]

This is pretty neat! We use a homegrown system built on Ruby on Rails that does a lot of this too. Good job getting all of this in Excel though. Truly impressive stuff!

Link to 900's system in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/FRC900/timesheet