I love the lengths it went to explain how to flash the microSD, connect the ribbon cable for the display driver board and then skipped over almost everything different and interesting about the project.
<i>Timetrack is a web application to handle an organization's employees' time keeping data. It is designed so that some employees will use their ID card to scan their clock-in and clock-out times. Others will be able to enter their time-in and time-out using the web interface directly. The system is designed to have two level approval process. The first is the group manager approval then the final approval is the director approval named 'Payroll Process Approval'. Currently the application handles two weeks pay period.</i><p><a href="https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack</a><p>Edit: I started to wonder, isn't time keeping a solved problem with many commercial vendors and maybe even established open source? Why would a city roll their own? Does that make them more of a hack target (internally developed software weaknesses) or less (not being part of a monocoulture of zero-days)? What are their plans for long term (20+ years) maintenance?<p>City-of-Bloomington/timetrack is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0<p><a href="https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master...</a>
Time clocks are a terrible racket. The hardware is ridiculously overpriced, and most of of the units I've seen are tremendously low-tech (a microcontroller w/ a no-name serial-to-Ethernet or serial-to-Wi-Fi board strapped to it). They speak ugly undocumented binary protocols and, increasingly, are tied to ugly web-based hosted subscription services.
I'm curious how an RFID reader works in a "not clunky" way since the application is delivered via a web browser. I'm assuming the RFID reader is just showing up as a virtual keyboard in this kind of setup.<p>Do the employees have to click on a form field before swiping their badge, etc?<p>Or maybe there's something like the RFID reader sending an unusual keycode that an event handler in the browser can wait for?
Excellent. I think rasps could do a lot more if knowledge of them and basic programming was more common. Plus a ton of my *nix learning was rasp based since wiping an SD card is easier than having hardware & understanding for VMs.<p>I do wonder at use of SD card in any sort of production environment. I've got half a dozen rasps and a dozen+ sd cards...and well it's been patchy. Sometimes it lasts sometimes not with no obvious pattern.<p>I don't mind that SD card are slow AF, but really feel the rasp could have been taken to the next level with a better (reliability) storage solution.
I made similar units for my org to replace the old iPod Touch units, most of which were suffering from swollen batteries. The cheap touchscreens I used tend to only last a year or two but they're only ~$30 on Amazon. So far no SD cards have failed.
I finally looked at the article and that is bit over-engineered in my opinion.<p>My favorite timeclock had a two-row character lcd character display, membrane keypad for digits and maybe 5 additional function buttons: clock in, clock out, lunch in, lunch out, and admin-mode.<p>We used the last 6 digits of our SS# to clock in and out with.<p>It had a serial interface.<p>Use an Arduino, and you can add the serial display, keypad if needed, serial rfid or barcode scanner, and ethernet or wifi.
I previously bought this thing:
<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA" rel="nofollow">https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA</a><p>Added ISO 14443 to it via an unused internal USB port I found once I cracked it open. Got Dropbear SSH running on the embedded Linux it was using. I think I originally rooted it by removing its internal SD card and fooling with the file system.
I have a similar project I need to decide how to do, basically have the Pi host a website whose data is updated by tapping an NFC card.<p>I can’t tell what part of this code interacts with RFID, maybe it will give me some ideas of how to do it, is it all happening through writing events to a CSV that the web interface reads from?
Is tracking job entry/leave that popular nowadays? I get it that there were punchcards for factory workers previously, but city workers?<p>Is this US-only thing or popular around the world also?
Just a little tip for the writer of the Article, give your employees their own touch-pen. Otherwise every employee will touch the exact same spot on the display...a big potential victory for Corona..or every other germ (had the same problem)
What happens when one of these devices is admitted as trial evidence? Is there a hardware root of trust that can be used for cryptographic verification? Has anyone succeeded in doing trusted boot on a Raspberry Pi?