Schoolbadge
Somewhere in 2020-2021 one of the school’s teachers proposed the idea of “lending” each kid a fluorescent jacket. The goal is them getting used to wearing it. Always.
There are existing systems to stimulate this, with stickers or stamps on a savings card. However, this is something they can only do for a few weeks because of extra workload involved.
Enter me: “Why don’t we just attach some RFID tags and read ‘m? Should be easy! Maybe the thing can play some movies, it will motivate the kids themselves to wear the fluo thingy.”
Guess what, it took me some time to get it all working. By ~1 November 2021 to be exact. It now exists of:
- RFID tags on all of the fluorescent jackets (only data being the serial number).
- 2 permanent units at the school (raspberry pi 3, 7″ screen, USB powered speakers).
- When reading successfully, the screen shows an image, a video, or black screen with sound.
- I made sure the same tag cannot be repeatedly read.
- I can download the .csv with all the registrations via tightvnc .
- I made a power query in excel, so the school is able to combine everything into a pivot table (very GDPR-savvy, me!).
There’s still some work to do:
- By next school year I’m making a mobile unit (based on a USB power bank).
- Some error handling is required. Currently the best practice is to … cut the current. Very old school but also quite satisfying.
- Automating data transfer.
- Making playback conditional based on tags. Would require tags to be categorised / year. (Still no personal data, I’m safe, GDPR-man!). Opens a lot of possibilities, especially regarding involving the older kids.
- Making the whole thing deployable (underlying raspbian install has gotten a bit bloated because of all my experiments).
In time I will probably add the source code to this page.
