My team has been playing around with a cuecat barcode scanner and looking at ways to record hours and team information.
Looking around Delphi there are some discussions on this topic but none that have gone really far. If anyone has any information about similar projects and implementation of it, it would be very appreciated.
we bought a barcode system for signing people into and out of our lab, and checking tools in and out of our tool crib, but couldn’t figure out how to get it to do what we wanted.
By the time our programmer played with it and kind of got it to do what we wanted build season was upon us and we had to put it aside.
Hopefully we’ll get it working sometime soon.
While is not as fancy as a bar code system, 862 implemented our Hours Card Program for the 2004 Build Season and have been using ever since.
Each students gets a card they are responsible for keeping track of their hours on their card, each days hours must be signed off by either a Mentor or Student Officer.
We collect and log all the cards then list by most hours per year and just for fun we rank each students hours for each year in a “master list”.
We had someone our team make this whole fingerprint program, that logs you in and out when you touch a sensor we bought. We used it for a little bit, but decided we would stick to the old fashion paper and pencil method. We made a spread sheet and printed everyones name and all you would have to do it write in log in/out time. It was simple and not that hard to manage, considering all the other hectic aspects of build season.
116 implemented a bar code system in 2008, and I’m sure that they can provide more details about the specifics.
Team 1511 implemented a Build Season Hours Timesheet three years ago. We used the OMR Bubbles Font, and the first year, we were able to scan all of the timecards and have a computer just log all the data for us. We actually now still use the same timesheet, but since one of our moms is great with data logging, she just enters all the hours herself into our requirements database that is built into our website.
Because we have a requirement for number of hours in build season (for those who want their trips paid for by team money), we had to have a way to track it. This seems to work pretty well, but I think we may borrow the ideas Joe J mentions and actually make some posts of those with the highest hours and other cool things like that 
Our team actually built an entire system. This year was its trial run. It worked fine except I accidentally deleted everyone’s session data midway through the season (we have backups twice a week now). We’re going to do a bit of tweaking for next year and hopefully use it to accurately manage everyone’s hours. It’s also integrated with a forum and wiki which we were just messing around with. I’m sure Chris Jelly would be more than happy to tell you about it (mostly his project with me working on bits).
We have the barcode scanner thing, but the problem is that people forget their cards and it just seems a lot faster for everyone to type their id in as they walk in the door. I hope we can release the system once it’s cleaned up a bit, but that’s Jelly’s decision.
EDIT: The system also has user information in it (name,team,email,phone,etc) along with any photos we got of people right in their “profile”.
What’s it built on, how much work was involved in it, and how much active use does it get? Also, how big is your team?
It’s built on PHP and MySQL (running on a linux server). During the build season, it got use when people signed in and out when the came and left. Also, people could check and edit their hours, create tasks and people could complete them and discuss on the forums. We had about 80 people on the user list, but I would say about 30-40 people used it actively. The pin entry page is a page that just makes an ajax request and people can just file on in and it tells you if you’re signing in or signing out. People could login and check all their stuff with their username and password.
EDIT: The actually framework for the system didn’t take long at all (a lot of it was done in the course of a few days). Tweaking and fixing took part of the pre-season. Work during the season was just adding the forum and a few other features.
Is there any chance that we could work with you in testing and refining the system? We have mentors that are versed in web development that could help out and we would love to have this sort of system in place for our team.