Idea Shop Check-in App

A project of the Idea Shop at the Illinois Institute of Technology, this web app provides a sign-in system to track and manage usage of our machine shop.

Getting started

We haven't yet figured out an optimal deployment procedure, those instructions will be shown here when we have a process available. The following instructions are dependent on Flask's Werkzeug development server and should NOT be exposed to a public network -- for development purposes only.

Prerequisites

flask
flask-bootstrap
flask-socketio
sqlalchemy
pysimplesoap (dependency of nkaminski/IITLookUp which is integrated in this project)
An application server running Python 3.6 (earlier versions are not supported)
A database server compatible with SQLAlchemy (the application is written with MariaDB/MySQL in mind)
nkaminski/piProx-oss or a compatible software (see below for interface documentation)
A touchscreen of resolution higher than 1280 x 1024

The Idea Shop's setup runs this on a Raspberry Pi using a generic HID card reader, compatible with our school-issued RFID cards.

Installation

Copy config.cfg.default to config.cfg.
Fill in config.cfg with database and university lookup credentials. The DB field should be filled out according to the SQLAlchemy documentation
pip install your database driver of choice. The Idea Shop's installation uses pymysql. (For MySQL, we highly recommend not using the default MySQL Connector for Python, because it returns all strings as byte arrays and neither SQLAlchemy nor our program is set up to handle that, leading to every string stored in the database being displayed in the app as b'string'.)
To start the app, run python (or python3) checkIn.py. The database tables will be automatically generated.

Card reader API

This application exposes a very simple (and very insecure at the moment) interface for card readers. A card read currently is triggered by an HTTP POST request to /card_read/<location_id> resembling an HTML form submission with at least 2 fields:

facility - the card's facility ID, currently unused
cardnum - the card's individual identifier

Any additional fields are discarded for the time being.

nkaminski/piProx-oss provides a working implementation of this interface in http-client.c.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. Please see LICENSE.md for the full text.