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StuyPulse Attendance Kiosk

Attendance kiosk for robotics meetings. Designed for the Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen (800x480 resolution). Built with Electron and React.

Screenshot of app

Exporting reports

Attendance data is stored locally on the device in a SQLite database. To export attendance reports, insert a USB drive and triple tap on the 694 logo. The following report types are available:

  • Attendance Report - Number of meetings attended, attendance rate, number of checkouts, checkout rate, and average and total time spent at meetings for each student
  • Meeting Report - Total unique checkins and checkout rate for each meeting day
  • Checkin Data - Checkin/checkout times and total time spent at meeting for each student on each meeting day (basically raw swipe data grouped by student and day)

Each of these reports is filtered by the specified date range and meeting threshold. The meeting threshold is the number of unique checkins required for a given day to be considered a meeting. This prevents presumably unofficial meetings from skewing the statistics.

A student counts as having checked out on a given day if their first and last swipes on that day are more than 30 minutes apart. This is to prevent multiple checkins in quick succession but no actual checkout (e.g. if the student forgot if they already swiped in and swiped in again) from bringing down the student's average time spent at meetings.

Development

To run the app in development mode, run:

npm start

This will start the Electron app with hot reloading enabled. Changes to the frontend (renderer process) code will take effect automatically, but changes to the main process require restarting the app.

Building

To build an arm64 deb package for the Raspberry Pi, run:

npm run make:pi

Barcode scanner configuration

This app can be used with any barcode scanner in keyboard emulation mode. The following instructions are for the Yokoscan EP8280, which we no longer use, but the documentation is left here for historical reference.

The Yokoscan EP8280 scanner is configured by scanning special barcodes which can be found in the user manual.

The scanner should be configured to read only Code 39 barcodes to optimize scanner efficiency and ignore spurious reads of the emergency QR code on student IDs, as well as other undesired inputs. The "Disable All Symbologies" code in the manual doesn't seem to work, so unfortunately it is necessary to scan the "off" code for each symbology individually.

The length range for Code 39 should also be set to a minimum and maximum of 11 characters (the length of an OSIS number plus start and stop characters). This configures the scanner to only read the OSIS barcode and not the other barcode on the ID card.

Raspberry Pi setup

Install the latest Raspberry Pi OS onto a microSD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager, then insert the microSD card into the Raspberry Pi and boot. Connect to Wi-Fi.

Upgrade and install packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

# Can't go without it
sudo apt-get install vim

# For debugging the SQLite database
sudo apt-get install sqlite3

Add the following to /boot/firmware/config.txt to enable charging the real-time clock battery (if applicable):

dtparam=rtc_bbat_vchg=3000000

In the Raspberry Pi Configuration, set up the following:

  • Set the hostname to attendance-kiosk
  • Set the locale to en_US.UTF-8
  • Set the timezone to America/New_York
  • Set the keyboard layout to Generic 104-key PC with English (US)
  • Set the Wi-Fi country to US

Install the attendance kiosk package:

sudo dpkg -i attendance-kiosk_1.0.0_arm64.deb

Add the following to ~/.config/wayfire.ini to autostart the attendance kiosk on boot, filling in the environment variables accordingly:

[autostart]
kiosk = SLACK_TOKEN="<slack token>" SLACK_EXPORT_USER_ID="<user ID>" attendance-kiosk --kiosk

Then reboot the Raspberry Pi for everything to take effect.