Lecturer and Student Attendance System with RFID

Abstract

Purpose: Manual recording of lecturer and student attendance at a university may potentially create inaccurate attendance recording. Particularly, manual attendance cannot accommodate the need for real-time attendance recording. Thus, this paper discusses on the design of a real-time attendance recording system by utilizing Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID). Methodology: The proposed attendance recording system is built using Arduino Uno microcontroller, RFID reader MFRC522, and Node.js that runs on a personal computer. To identify each lecturer and student, every one of them is associated with a unique identifier called UID. Upon detection of valid UID, the system can determine whether a lecturer or a student comes late to the class or not in real-time. Any event of lateness will be identified as a violation of the university policy. In addition to that, the system is able to store various information related to the courses in the university, and also send email notifications through a PHP application. All necessary data required by the system is managed by MySQL. Results: Based on the tests conducted, data entry to the database, RFID reading, and lateness checking is determined to work as expected. RFID reading from the same card occasionally gives a different UID being read, which may be due to failure in the RFID reader or RFID tag. Time accuracy test on lateness recording gives only 80% accuracy, this inaccuracy is suspected to be the result of the unstable Internet connection between PC and database. Applications/Originality/Value: This attendance system is developed to conform with Pelita Harapan University’s policies on lecturer and student attendance in class. It is hoped that this system can be considered as an improvement to the current attendance system at Pelita Harapan University.