Penn State ACM Check-in

Shane Tully ([email protected])

shanetully.com & acm.psu.edu

Note: An actively maintained fork of this project exists at https://github.com/clemsonMakerspace/Magstripe_Attendance.

Dependencies

The Penn State ACM Check-in is a Python 2.x application. There are two dependencies:

1. PyQt - Python bindings for QT
2. MySQLdb - Python MySQL library

Database

To actaully use it, however, you will need a database server (either a remote server or hosted locally). The default host, database, table, and host are configurable in the Constants.py module or are able to be entered in the login screen of the application.

For the database, this application expects a table with four columns:

1. card ID - card ID from ID card (varchar, primary key)
2. access ID - human-readable owner of card (varchar)
3. points - the number of points (int)
4. last check-in - the time of last check-in (timestamp)

You'll probably want to change the default database information for your database in Constants.py.

Finally, the whole script is pointless without a card reader. This application was built for a card read that uses keyboard emulation. Hence, you could just type the card info in, but without a card reader you have no way of knowing what that info is.

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 if a card doesn't exist in the database you will be prompted to add it.

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

Note that, by default, a card is only allowed to check-in once per hour to prevent abuse. This can be disabled by setting ALLOW_CHECKIN_WITHIN_HOUR to 0 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 are available on the releases page on the GitHub repo.

License

Copyright (C) 2013 Shane Tully

This program 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.

This program 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/.