Magstripe Attendance Database

Owen Phillips ([email protected])

Shane Tully ([email protected])

Dependencies

This is a Python 3.x program depending on the following additional libraries

1. PyQt - Python bindings for QT
2. psycopg2 - Python Postgres library

Configuration

This program requires a database server (remote or local), that is configurable in 'Constants.py' or may be selected during login.

For the database, this application expects two tables - users & checkIns

Setup the users table with 6 columns:

1. card ID - card ID from ID card (varchar, primary key)
2. user ID - university username (varchar)
3. visits - the number of check-ins (int)
4. First Name - User's first name ('text')
5. Last Name - User's last name ('text')
6. last_checkIn - User's last checkIn ('timestamp')

Setup the checkIns table with 3 columns:

1. card ID - card ID from ID card ('varchar', 'primary key')
2. checkIn - the time of last check-in (timestamp, 'primary key')
3. visit_num - User's nth check-in ('int', 'primary key')

This application was built for a card reader that uses keyboard emulation. You can type the card info in, but a card reader is suggested.

Usage

Simply run "./Check-in.py" to start the GUI.

There is also a text-only mode. This can be started by using the "--nogui" argument. In text mode, enter "back" at any time to go up a menu level or exit the check-in loop.

To populate your database, select the check-in option and begin adding users.

After your database is populated you can use the "Show Visits" option to show a single user's visits or view a pretty table of all users in descending order from most to least points.

By default a card is only allowed to check-in once per hour to prevent abuse. This can be modified by changing the value of ALLOW_CHECKIN_WITHIN_HOUR in Constants.py.

Packaging

A PyInstaller .spec file is provided to package the program and all dependencies into a single binary file for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

To create this binary, download PyInstaller and run make.py dist [path to pyinstaller]. The resulting binary will be in the dist directory. Alternatively, precompiled binaries may be available on the releases page on the GitHub repo.

License

Magstripe Attendance is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Magstripe Attendance is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/