I’ve gone through your all posts in this thread. Your effort is really awesome. We also tried designing hardware from scratch. The cost became too high while we provide the sufficient memory (4+GB) for transaction logs, user database, multiple arduino chips for parallel processing, and ethernet/gprs/wifi processing, handling offline data and management online communication adding additional runtime memory and etc.,
At the end, we worked with the existing hardware vendors and we made the biometrics device adding with the motherboard we made. Now our machines can be used for integrating with ErpNext without any support of desktop application. Machine supports rfid, fingerprint, face and palm attendance types and the no. of users supported in the devices varies from 500 to 100,000. Refer [WORKING] Attendance with Biometric Integration through API for messages from our satisfied customers and refer Buy Biometric Time Attendance and Access Control System With Web API or Online SDK | Cams Biometrics for our product list.
@rijul we have existing PR. We will work on the Test Case and the Documentation. See here https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/pull/15216. The device is done. Though we bump into a problem that port is accessed only in HTTP but our server has HTTPS redirect as well. As to the your second question, it doesn’t store locally. It will make an API call directly and make a post real time.
Initial release of the project, we are not stable yet and this is WIP but please check it out. This is completely open source, PCB fabrication files, CAD data, arduino code it’s all there!
I think the attendace needs to be tracking in & out points and calculate attendace based on time (actually what the timesheets do). For now the most finegrained attandance is half a day which I believe does not apply justice to very many real scenarios.
Hi @dominik any progress on this matter? I have a customer who is very much interested. Maybe we could take this chance as a use-case to see if it works. The customer is in the 3d sintering business and would surely be able to print a nice casing.
if you look at the repository’s & PR’s activity this project seems not to have made progress since ~November 2018 months.
I could imagine the Attendance not being build to record fine-grained in/out point or time periods may be the hurdle to hight to jump over. Is it @creamdory?
@vrms@wojosc the biggest hurdle we had for this was the Arduino hardware can only access port only in HTTP.
@rijul we have existing PR. We will work on the Test Case and the Documentation. See here [Doctype] Employee Checkin by creamdory · Pull Request #15216 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub 32. The device is done. Though we bump into a problem that port is accessed only in HTTP but our server has HTTPS redirect as well. As to the your second question, it doesn’t store locally. It will make an API call directly and make a post real time.
This is a great effort towards something organisations demand everywhere. On One thread I read here a while ago, @rmehta mentioned something about abandoning or avoiding a version of web based employee attendance implementation within erpnext because it could easily be “gamed”. Anyone could login from anywhere and say they attended work.
I’m wondering how this project addresses the problem of one employee clocking in for the rest. I went through this entire thread and didn’t see this concern raised or addressed. I think without added access control, RFID cards pose this problem and this may be the reason behind the increasing popularity of biometrics.
I guess that is true, yes. Though clocking in and ou is only a timestamp which could easily be calculated toward a preset number of daily working hours and could then also be used to fill the attendance accordingly.
Thank you for the clarification. Is there any estimate your are looking to when this can be solved? Maybe having a local raspberry Pi which acts as communicator making the final call toward https on the ernext instance could do the trick.
We use ernext full online, as we are a very agile company. Our customer however is a stationary manufacturing company like eso. It might even make sense to store timestamps offline, as this should be tracked when employees enter the premises ignoring the fact if the company is “online” or not.
I don’t believe that to be true necessarily . The attendance is just very rough grained. Full and half days. that’s it. So I think there needs to be done some work in making the Attendance more flexible.
I agree that the tools generally are there in the Timesheet functionality. Just no idea how easy or difficult it is to put this into the Attendance. I am surprised that neither @creamdory, nor @dominik have mentioned working on this )or did I miss something here?). So I am not quite getting what they are after. Tracking whole/half days with a RFID chip to me seems to be falling short.
I think that this is a non-issue. If you employ employees who game your timesheets the challenge that you have is not that you have to pay “unworked” hours. Your company and your culture is questionable. If you feel, you need to control your employees on that level that’s a similar problem.
