This year my team wants to start tracking each individual member’s hours in the maker space. Due to school policy, we are not allowed to use biometric scanners so I thought of creating each member a QR Code or Bar Code they have to scan when coming in and out of the Lab. The simplest solution that occurred to me was creating a QR code that’s to the linked to a short Google Form that you’d fill in and mark the time you got in. You would do the same to go out.
Now this is obviously complicated, does anyone know of a free or inexpensive system that would allow me to gather that data in a more efficient way?
Team 254 has a system on their GitHub. We also have a system where all students have a unique ID that they enter into a PyQt application that’s on a Raspberry Pi right next to the entrance/exit. That application is on our GitHub.
If you don’t feel you can get something fancy right off the bat, you can go low tech. “Enter your hours in this Google Sheet if you want credit for them”. Works surprisingly well.
We use FalconHours, our fork of GrizzlyTime by Team 66. We run the program on a Raspberry Pi, connected to an old spare monitor:
A few weeks after the picture was taken, we printed individual barcodes for each student that they could attach to their phone case or wallet, and connected a spare barcode scanner that one of our mentors had lying around. This way, students could scan their code when entering and exiting the build space.
Is it this application? Amazing on the convergence of ideas if not; Team 294 is running this on a Pi and it’s written in PyQt. They use barcodes or just typing in their ID number to sign in and out. Data for 294 is saved to an online database but it supports saving to a csv file locally as well. GitHub - team294/signinapp: GUI sign-in interface to team roster
No, but it shares a lot of similarities, such as saving information as CSV. We don’t have barcode support, probably because our school IDs are on lanyards and that would be a safety hazard.
The coolest sign-in system I’ve seen is from 6328 - a student of their team wrote something to log the IPs of the phones in their build space, which they correspond to the team member. No manual input necessary.
3128 found a barcode scanner on ebay, and just has students scan their student IDs to sign in and out of the shop. It’s smart because students are already carrying school-assigned identification with a unique barcode, so they didn’t need to assign anyone a new ID number or anything.
ATAA developed our own build space software in 2019 by that season’s scouting lead.
Since we use slack, it is connected to slack, informing when the space is open or not. Alongside that, each slack user has a ID attached, with a QR code lanyard to sign in with.
It records all the hours to a spreadsheet accessible online from home (however, I forget the password often) and can be easily downloaded.
For this season, it also could be separated into years, or all-time.
I’m just gonna shill GrizzlyTime. It’s an extremely portable time tracker and even gives you some pretty nice analytics and graphs compatible with Google sheets.
Additionally the registration for each new team member is done in-app and takes an average of less than 2 minutes.
I’ve written a longer post about the 6328 attendance system linked below. Essentially, it uses WiFi sniffing to pull the MAC addresses of devices in the build space and track team hours automatically. We’ve found that the data is precise enough to be useful and is quite consistent (since most people never have to think about it). Our code is available on GitHub along with setup instructions.
For 2017/2018 we used a modified version of 294s attendance tracking system.
in the summer of 2018, I had one of our kids write a new version to add some features useful for me (such as automatically creating new IDs based on school, graduation year and autogenerating a report, or being able to modify existing data through a GUI). We wanted to keep a lot of the things that the 294 system had.
the tracking part of it works great on a pi. Trying to modify the data log or autogenerate a report is very slow on the pi. What I typically do is copy over the files onto my laptop, run the python GUI to autogenerate the report or modify the log, then copy over any modified log files back to the pi if needed.
Here we have ID cards with QR codes in the back that is read with a custom app to register the attendance of students during the season, they also look really cool and give a more “professional” feel
Seconded. We are starting to see if we can implement something similar, this is just such a sleek solution to a normally cumbersome problem. Kudos to 6328 for figuring this out.
We started using grizzlytimethis season and it was a huge help. So much easier than pen and paper.
We purchased a cheap usb bar code scanner off Amazon and set it up on an old laptop near the entrance to the shop. We used the bar code on the student IDs but you could also easily generate your own and pass them out.
