HereCard

Revolutionizing School Attendance

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Note: If, for any reason, the website, https://herecard.tech/ does not work, use this website instead: https://herecard.akze.repl.co/.

HereCard

Website: Click

FRONTEND Repository: ayy-akshat/HereCard

BACKEND Repository: ayy-akshat/HereCardBackend

ARDUINO (hardware code) Repository: ayy-akshat/HereCard_Arduino

Pitch video link: Watch on YouTube.

HereCard- A faster way for attendance for students AND teachers!

How It Works (Flowchart)

  • Scanning - RFID Card --> RFID Sensor --> Arduino --> Raspberry Pi --> HTTP Request to Python Backend --> Firebase Database
  • View Attendance Data - HTML/CSS/JS Frontend --> HTTP Request to Python Backend --> Firebase Database --> Python returns Data to Frontend --> Display Data

Inspiration

For centuries, people have been taking attendance the long way. We wanted to make a system that allowed attendance to be taken easily and fast for both students AND teachers!

What it does

First, a student scans their RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification, the ID card they have) on the scanner on the wall when they come to class. The scanner sends the backend a request, updating them as present or late in the database, depending on the time. The teacher can view attendance on the website to see who was absent, late, or present for the day in their class. Teachers can also update attendance for their class. They can set a student as absent/late/present, through the website's simple user interface.

How we built it

We used an Arduino connected to a Raspberry Pi for the hardware part, with an RFID module on the Arduino. The Raspberry Pi code was made with Node-Red. For the backend, we used the Flask module (a web framework) in Python. For the frontend, we made a website using HTML, CSS, and JS.

Challenges

We didn’t have a wifi module for the Arduino, so we had to find a way around this, using something else to make web requests. We decided to use a Raspberry Pi connected to the Arduino to make the web requests to the backend server. We didn't know how to use node-red, which was what was used to run code in the Raspberry Pi when it got an event from the Arduino, but we learned how to use it and got past the challenge.

Accomplishments

One great accomplishment we made was making our first hardware hack in a hackathon. We haven't done hardware hacks in hackathons before, so it was a great learning experience. Another achievement was making three different components of our product that all work seamlessly together without problems.

What's next?

If this were to be used in the real world, this would be on the wall of all classrooms and all students would have their own RFIDs. On the website, there is a section to make an order request. This includes a PayPal button, as well as saying "Your request has been sent!". In a practical application of this product, there would be a maintenance team that approves the product requests, also managing the payments. To be more practical for the payment, we could have it implemented into the actual website rather than having a PayPal. The best idea for a practically made website for this product would have the process of the order request being automated, with the product ID coming with the physical product, that the user can link to their account. Finally, we can have better security rules in the database to make the site more secure.

Why we submitted to these categories:

  • Education: With teachers losing precious time that could be used for teaching, our product makes the process of attendance seamless. It greatly reduces the amount of work teachers need to do in their lives, allowing them to dedicate more energy into their students' success.

  • Social Good: Increasing the time teachers have in class to teach and making it easier to keep track of attendance will help in the long run, as it will reduce the hassle of inputting attendance, making it much more simple and smooth.

  • Web: Having a website to track attendance makes the product easily accessible and usable on all devices, improving accessibility. The web portion obtains data from and seamlessly integrates with the hardware portion to provide a polished product that combines many different software/hardware tools together.

  • Cloud: Storing the attendance data in the cloud allows teachers to be able to keep track of attendance from any physical location or device without having to have locally stored files. It is also designed to integrate closely with all of the components in our product, which is why it is able to run smoothly with no problems.

  • Domain: Having a simple domain name such as the one we have is key to having a simple and accessible website. Our domain name, "herecard.tech" combines attendance (hence the "here"), the RFID cards used in our product (hence the "card"), and the idea of technological advancement (hence the "tech").

  • Hardware: Our product closely integrated a variety of hardware components including an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, an RFID sensor, and an LCD display, all working together in a circuit to interact with the web and backend portions of the product to create an overall polished product.

  • AB InBev (Brighter Future): This product introduces a technological advancement involving automation in our societies, advancing humanity further in technology.

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