11 ms·

TimeTrack Raspberry Pi

145 points by ethanpil 5y ago

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Time clocks are a terrible racket. The hardware is ridiculously overpriced, and most of of the units I've seen are tremendously low-tech (a microcontroller w/ a no-name serial-to-Ethernet or serial-to-Wi-Fi board strapped to it). They speak ugly undocumented binary protocols and, increasingly, are tied to ugly web-based hosted subscription services.
- swamp40 5y ago
  What is your idea of a beautiful protocol/method?
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    Something documented. Binary is fine. Text is fine. Document it.
    - NortySpock 5y ago
      Text is preferred because a regular layperson might be able to read it if stuff breaks. See: XML, Json.
      - iamsrp 5y ago
        I was agreeing right up until "XML" :)
- xnyan 5y ago
  Often once it's established that X costs Y, it's very easy to just keep writing the check especially when it's probably not a huge expense relative to revenue and the risk of getting in trouble if the change goes wrong. In this specific case, I worked with one of the large manufacturers (hi Khronos) and this is their customer: clocking-in is not your business, your business is selling something or running a hospital or whatever and clocking-in is a problem you that want to solve by writing a check. Not by hiring staff to set up or replace broken units (you generally pay a vendor for this) or adding any other overhead to your operation besides a check, and this is a service Khronos would love to charge you for. Also on a human level, Khronos and orgs like them tend to have a good sales staff that are talented at knocking on the door. Lower-margin sellers can't afford to compete with the (expensive) talents of a good salesperson. Cisco is the gold standard of this behavior, there are almost always cheaper options that will work as well, but as they say, nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco and their sales reps skillfully deploy steak dinners and golf trips to IT execs with great success.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Target market is small. I'm glad they haven't got to slick. There's usually an underpaid employee who has to deal with the devise. I dread the day where employees are required to wear "productivity" wrist bands, like the one Amazon patented. I see it coming. The employers will know exactly where (gps), and what every employee is doing. (The Fairmont Hotel wanted my father to carry around a pager. It was a directive from the Swiglets. (inside joke). He kept droping it down the elevator shaft. They finally got the hint. They couldn't fire him because he was the only one who could reset the switch gear breakers after a hard rain. The breaker hot bars would bubble (thousands of volt amps) when flooded. My father would walk in the bubbling water to reset the flooded breakers. The only reason he wasen't electrocuted is because it was rain water, and luck. I belive the old hotel fixed the switch gear by now.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    I remember a doc/5 minutes segment 3-5 years ago showing employees with RFID chip under the skin to reduce friction when opening doors leading to restricted access and give access to printers. And now that I think about it there's a comment of mine somewhere with a link to a line of connected motion sensors mounted in office chairs to "optimize lightning costs". edit: found it again: https://partners.sigfox.com/products/occupancy-and-chair-utilization-monitoring-with-simplepack https://partners.sigfox.com/products/occupancy-and-chair-uti... Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring? Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization
adolph 5y ago
Timetrack is a web application to handle an organization's employees' time keeping data. It is designed so that some employees will use their ID card to scan their clock-in and clock-out times. Others will be able to enter their time-in and time-out using the web interface directly. The system is designed to have two level approval process. The first is the group manager approval then the final approval is the director approval named 'Payroll Process Approval'. Currently the application handles two weeks pay period. https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack Edit: I started to wonder, isn't time keeping a solved problem with many commercial vendors and maybe even established open source? Why would a city roll their own? Does that make them more of a hack target (internally developed software weaknesses) or less (not being part of a monocoulture of zero-days)? What are their plans for long term (20+ years) maintenance? City-of-Bloomington/timetrack is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master...
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...") or by making time tracking part of a larger suite of HR products.
  - triattr 5y ago
    > The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...") This sounds interesting. Can you link to any of these services or software? What do you mean by "scaring employers re: regulatory compliance"? "Scaring" reads like you're implying some kind of manipulation, but "regulatory compliance" is something a company should already be in; what is there to fear? What are "local HR laws"?
    - blindluke 5y ago
spicybright 5y ago
Too bad it's a Pi inside. Give it a few years and most will fail from bad SD cards... A cheap consumer tablet will keep ticking for years.
- recursive 5y ago
  So it will fail after the same length of time that a consumer tablet will keep ticking? FWIW, I use an ipad to enter a code at my kids' pre-school. The screens are frequently messed up.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    I can't say for certain, but I would trust an iPad to run longer than a stock raspi + touch screen used in the same way.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  …so it’s a good thing the part that wears out is the easiest thing in the world to replace, right?
  - spicybright 5y ago
    The cost of replacement isn't 0, you need to hire a replacement crew which is insanely expensive in comparison.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  You can directly boot a Pi from USB now with the Pi 4. Switch to a SSD and you won't worry about SD card corruption as much. The bigger issue is that you need to cleanly shutdown any embedded system instead of just yanking or hard cutting power--flash memory and filesystems need time to sync. The Pi is no more or no less susceptible to this problem. Also you're comparing to a tablet, a device with a _built in battery_ that prevents hard power loss in 99% of circumstances. Just because you press the power button on your tablet does not mean it is immediately cutting power to the device. If you add a battery backup and soft power switch to the Pi you would be just as reliable as a tablet. If you remove the battery from a tablet and hard cut the power, you can just as easily corrupt its flash memory filesystem.
thedanbob 5y ago
I made similar units for my org to replace the old iPod Touch units, most of which were suffering from swollen batteries. The cheap touchscreens I used tend to only last a year or two but they're only ~$30 on Amazon. So far no SD cards have failed.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I have a similar project I need to decide how to do, basically have the Pi host a website whose data is updated by tapping an NFC card. I can’t tell what part of this code interacts with RFID, maybe it will give me some ideas of how to do it, is it all happening through writing events to a CSV that the web interface reads from?
- wiml 5y ago
  The RFID readers I've dealt with show up as a tty (either an actual UART or something emulated over USB). Writing a small script to accept well formed input from the tty and then update your database, make an http request, or whatever is straightforward.
alias_neo 5y ago
I love the lengths it went to explain how to flash the microSD, connect the ribbon cable for the display driver board and then skipped over almost everything different and interesting about the project.
- xupybd 5y ago
  It looks like that page is just a setup guide. At least it's linked as a setup guide on the GitHub page.
- dexterhaslem 5y ago
  that was seriously strange pacing
  - dylan604 5y ago
    draw a circle. draw the rest of the fucking owl.
    - randmeerkat 5y ago
      Bahahaha
    - M_bara 5y ago
      Thereisnoowl. At least there’s one in the online guardian newspaper. His comments are interesting to say the least. https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/3031812?page=1 https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/3031812?page=1
      - 45ure 5y ago
        The parent is referencing r/restofthefuckingowl For tutorials and diagrams with a comical lack of instructions between the start and end.
- azernik 5y ago
  Its audience is not curious hackers; it's other organizations who might want to use this solution.
tyingq 5y ago
I'm curious how an RFID reader works in a "not clunky" way since the application is delivered via a web browser. I'm assuming the RFID reader is just showing up as a virtual keyboard in this kind of setup. Do the employees have to click on a form field before swiping their badge, etc? Or maybe there's something like the RFID reader sending an unusual keycode that an event handler in the browser can wait for?
- zeusk 5y ago
  My university had this, and you're right. When I tap the ID card, it would just blurt out my uni ID number in whichever field had the focus.
- northwest65 5y ago
  https://www.easytechjunkie.com/what-is-a-keyboard-wedge.htm https://www.easytechjunkie.com/what-is-a-keyboard-wedge.htm
- nkellenicki 5y ago
  Focus can be set automatically in the desired field using Javascript, and tricks can be done to hide that field too - ie. set opacity so it's transparent, etc. You can make it work pretty smoothly for the end user. Some of the original Yubikeys worked this way, and there are some barcode scanners out there that emulate keyboards too. I've seen some web based implementations go to great lengths to hide this fact.
  - extra88 5y ago
    Focus can also be set automatically on page load by adding the HTML ‘autofocus’ attribute to the input field.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Still sounds a bit clunky, as you would have people in line, and the page would need to smoothly be ready for the next person, deal with double-scans of the card, etc. I'd certainly prefer something like un-typeable keycodes to listen for as start/end markers.
user3939382 5y ago
I previously bought this thing: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA Added ISO 14443 to it via an unused internal USB port I found once I cracked it open. Got Dropbear SSH running on the embedded Linux it was using. I think I originally rooted it by removing its internal SD card and fooling with the file system.
Havoc 5y ago
Excellent. I think rasps could do a lot more if knowledge of them and basic programming was more common. Plus a ton of my *nix learning was rasp based since wiping an SD card is easier than having hardware & understanding for VMs. I do wonder at use of SD card in any sort of production environment. I've got half a dozen rasps and a dozen+ sd cards...and well it's been patchy. Sometimes it lasts sometimes not with no obvious pattern. I don't mind that SD card are slow AF, but really feel the rasp could have been taken to the next level with a better (reliability) storage solution.
- dan_quixote 5y ago
  I've seen success using RAMDisk instead of running entirely on SD card
  - MrFoof 5y ago
    RAMdisks also help significantly with maximizing the write endurance of the SD card. Specifically for log files, I use Log2RAM which has a RAMdisk that mounts /var/log, and then periodically (based on schedule, defaulting to daily) flushes it to /var/hdd.log/
  - Havoc 5y ago
    Agreed. It's an ugly hack to a problem that should not exist in the first place. Normal level writes to os disk should not be a OS fatal situational in <year. No matter how you look at this it is not awesome.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Use it in read-only mode and have durable writes go to the cloud. Better, have all your software already packaged to the image you'll flash on the SD card. https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/ https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I recently spent a little time at a company that used an embedded Pi in their product. It had to have a lot of data on hand that needed refreshing daily, with an unreliable network, so everything had to be local. Their biggest problem was SD corruption.
rubicks 5y ago
What happens when one of these devices is admitted as trial evidence? Is there a hardware root of trust that can be used for cryptographic verification? Has anyone succeeded in doing trusted boot on a Raspberry Pi?
- tyingq 5y ago
  Seems overkill since you could just hand your badge to a buddy and have them clock you in. There's no fingerprint scans, etc, involved here.
  - mistasteve 5y ago
    yeah it's a step away from honor system pretty much
- pjerem 5y ago
  Most computers on this planet have the same problem. Even your ISP could technically create and provide false logs to incriminate you if they wanted.
jacknews 5y ago
This looks to me like modern tech supporting antiquated working practices.
krzyk 5y ago
Is tracking job entry/leave that popular nowadays? I get it that there were punchcards for factory workers previously, but city workers? Is this US-only thing or popular around the world also?
- dEnigma 5y ago
  The two office jobs I worked in Austria both had me punch in and out.
- nix23 5y ago
  Sometimes it's law (like in Switzerland).
nix23 5y ago
Just a little tip for the writer of the Article, give your employees their own touch-pen. Otherwise every employee will touch the exact same spot on the display...a big potential victory for Corona..or every other germ (had the same problem)
daniellarusso 5y ago
I finally looked at the article and that is bit over-engineered in my opinion. My favorite timeclock had a two-row character lcd character display, membrane keypad for digits and maybe 5 additional function buttons: clock in, clock out, lunch in, lunch out, and admin-mode. We used the last 6 digits of our SS# to clock in and out with. It had a serial interface. Use an Arduino, and you can add the serial display, keypad if needed, serial rfid or barcode scanner, and ethernet or wifi.
hiidrew 5y ago
shout out my university town <3
wtf_is_up 5y ago
The package name starting with 'in.' instead of 'gov.in.' bugs me.

145 points by ethanpil 5y ago

Time clocks are a terrible racket. The hardware is ridiculously overpriced, and most of of the units I've seen are tremendously low-tech (a microcontroller w/ a no-name serial-to-Ethernet or serial-to-Wi-Fi board strapped to it). They speak ugly undocumented binary protocols and, increasingly, are tied to ugly web-based hosted subscription services.

swamp40 5y ago
What is your idea of a beautiful protocol/method?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Something documented. Binary is fine. Text is fine. Document it.
  - NortySpock 5y ago
    Text is preferred because a regular layperson might be able to read it if stuff breaks. See: XML, Json.
    - iamsrp 5y ago
      I was agreeing right up until "XML" :)
xnyan 5y ago
Often once it's established that X costs Y, it's very easy to just keep writing the check especially when it's probably not a huge expense relative to revenue and the risk of getting in trouble if the change goes wrong. In this specific case, I worked with one of the large manufacturers (hi Khronos) and this is their customer: clocking-in is not your business, your business is selling something or running a hospital or whatever and clocking-in is a problem you that want to solve by writing a check. Not by hiring staff to set up or replace broken units (you generally pay a vendor for this) or adding any other overhead to your operation besides a check, and this is a service Khronos would love to charge you for. Also on a human level, Khronos and orgs like them tend to have a good sales staff that are talented at knocking on the door. Lower-margin sellers can't afford to compete with the (expensive) talents of a good salesperson. Cisco is the gold standard of this behavior, there are almost always cheaper options that will work as well, but as they say, nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco and their sales reps skillfully deploy steak dinners and golf trips to IT execs with great success.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Target market is small. I'm glad they haven't got to slick. There's usually an underpaid employee who has to deal with the devise. I dread the day where employees are required to wear "productivity" wrist bands, like the one Amazon patented. I see it coming. The employers will know exactly where (gps), and what every employee is doing. (The Fairmont Hotel wanted my father to carry around a pager. It was a directive from the Swiglets. (inside joke). He kept droping it down the elevator shaft. They finally got the hint. They couldn't fire him because he was the only one who could reset the switch gear breakers after a hard rain. The breaker hot bars would bubble (thousands of volt amps) when flooded. My father would walk in the bubbling water to reset the flooded breakers. The only reason he wasen't electrocuted is because it was rain water, and luck. I belive the old hotel fixed the switch gear by now.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  I remember a doc/5 minutes segment 3-5 years ago showing employees with RFID chip under the skin to reduce friction when opening doors leading to restricted access and give access to printers. And now that I think about it there's a comment of mine somewhere with a link to a line of connected motion sensors mounted in office chairs to "optimize lightning costs". edit: found it again: https://partners.sigfox.com/products/occupancy-and-chair-utilization-monitoring-with-simplepack https://partners.sigfox.com/products/occupancy-and-chair-uti... Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring? Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization

adolph 5y ago

Timetrack is a web application to handle an organization's employees' time keeping data. It is designed so that some employees will use their ID card to scan their clock-in and clock-out times. Others will be able to enter their time-in and time-out using the web interface directly. The system is designed to have two level approval process. The first is the group manager approval then the final approval is the director approval named 'Payroll Process Approval'. Currently the application handles two weeks pay period. https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack Edit: I started to wonder, isn't time keeping a solved problem with many commercial vendors and maybe even established open source? Why would a city roll their own? Does that make them more of a hack target (internally developed software weaknesses) or less (not being part of a monocoulture of zero-days)? What are their plans for long term (20+ years) maintenance? City-of-Bloomington/timetrack is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/timetrack/blob/master...

EvanAnderson 5y ago
The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...") or by making time tracking part of a larger suite of HR products.
- triattr 5y ago
  > The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...") This sounds interesting. Can you link to any of these services or software? What do you mean by "scaring employers re: regulatory compliance"? "Scaring" reads like you're implying some kind of manipulation, but "regulatory compliance" is something a company should already be in; what is there to fear? What are "local HR laws"?
  - blindluke 5y ago

spicybright 5y ago

Too bad it's a Pi inside. Give it a few years and most will fail from bad SD cards... A cheap consumer tablet will keep ticking for years.

recursive 5y ago
So it will fail after the same length of time that a consumer tablet will keep ticking? FWIW, I use an ipad to enter a code at my kids' pre-school. The screens are frequently messed up.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I can't say for certain, but I would trust an iPad to run longer than a stock raspi + touch screen used in the same way.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
…so it’s a good thing the part that wears out is the easiest thing in the world to replace, right?
- spicybright 5y ago
  The cost of replacement isn't 0, you need to hire a replacement crew which is insanely expensive in comparison.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
You can directly boot a Pi from USB now with the Pi 4. Switch to a SSD and you won't worry about SD card corruption as much. The bigger issue is that you need to cleanly shutdown any embedded system instead of just yanking or hard cutting power--flash memory and filesystems need time to sync. The Pi is no more or no less susceptible to this problem. Also you're comparing to a tablet, a device with a _built in battery_ that prevents hard power loss in 99% of circumstances. Just because you press the power button on your tablet does not mean it is immediately cutting power to the device. If you add a battery backup and soft power switch to the Pi you would be just as reliable as a tablet. If you remove the battery from a tablet and hard cut the power, you can just as easily corrupt its flash memory filesystem.

thedanbob 5y ago

I made similar units for my org to replace the old iPod Touch units, most of which were suffering from swollen batteries. The cheap touchscreens I used tend to only last a year or two but they're only ~$30 on Amazon. So far no SD cards have failed.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

I have a similar project I need to decide how to do, basically have the Pi host a website whose data is updated by tapping an NFC card. I can’t tell what part of this code interacts with RFID, maybe it will give me some ideas of how to do it, is it all happening through writing events to a CSV that the web interface reads from?

wiml 5y ago
The RFID readers I've dealt with show up as a tty (either an actual UART or something emulated over USB). Writing a small script to accept well formed input from the tty and then update your database, make an http request, or whatever is straightforward.

alias_neo 5y ago

I love the lengths it went to explain how to flash the microSD, connect the ribbon cable for the display driver board and then skipped over almost everything different and interesting about the project.

xupybd 5y ago
It looks like that page is just a setup guide. At least it's linked as a setup guide on the GitHub page.
dexterhaslem 5y ago
that was seriously strange pacing
- dylan604 5y ago
  draw a circle. draw the rest of the fucking owl.
  - randmeerkat 5y ago
    Bahahaha
  - M_bara 5y ago
    Thereisnoowl. At least there’s one in the online guardian newspaper. His comments are interesting to say the least. https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/3031812?page=1 https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/3031812?page=1
    - 45ure 5y ago
      The parent is referencing r/restofthefuckingowl For tutorials and diagrams with a comical lack of instructions between the start and end.
azernik 5y ago
Its audience is not curious hackers; it's other organizations who might want to use this solution.

tyingq 5y ago

I'm curious how an RFID reader works in a "not clunky" way since the application is delivered via a web browser. I'm assuming the RFID reader is just showing up as a virtual keyboard in this kind of setup. Do the employees have to click on a form field before swiping their badge, etc? Or maybe there's something like the RFID reader sending an unusual keycode that an event handler in the browser can wait for?

zeusk 5y ago
My university had this, and you're right. When I tap the ID card, it would just blurt out my uni ID number in whichever field had the focus.
northwest65 5y ago
https://www.easytechjunkie.com/what-is-a-keyboard-wedge.htm https://www.easytechjunkie.com/what-is-a-keyboard-wedge.htm
nkellenicki 5y ago
Focus can be set automatically in the desired field using Javascript, and tricks can be done to hide that field too - ie. set opacity so it's transparent, etc. You can make it work pretty smoothly for the end user. Some of the original Yubikeys worked this way, and there are some barcode scanners out there that emulate keyboards too. I've seen some web based implementations go to great lengths to hide this fact.
- extra88 5y ago
  Focus can also be set automatically on page load by adding the HTML ‘autofocus’ attribute to the input field.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Still sounds a bit clunky, as you would have people in line, and the page would need to smoothly be ready for the next person, deal with double-scans of the card, etc. I'd certainly prefer something like un-typeable keycodes to listen for as start/end markers.

user3939382 5y ago

I previously bought this thing: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0155NL3MA Added ISO 14443 to it via an unused internal USB port I found once I cracked it open. Got Dropbear SSH running on the embedded Linux it was using. I think I originally rooted it by removing its internal SD card and fooling with the file system.

Havoc 5y ago

Excellent. I think rasps could do a lot more if knowledge of them and basic programming was more common. Plus a ton of my *nix learning was rasp based since wiping an SD card is easier than having hardware & understanding for VMs. I do wonder at use of SD card in any sort of production environment. I've got half a dozen rasps and a dozen+ sd cards...and well it's been patchy. Sometimes it lasts sometimes not with no obvious pattern. I don't mind that SD card are slow AF, but really feel the rasp could have been taken to the next level with a better (reliability) storage solution.

dan_quixote 5y ago
I've seen success using RAMDisk instead of running entirely on SD card
- MrFoof 5y ago
  RAMdisks also help significantly with maximizing the write endurance of the SD card. Specifically for log files, I use Log2RAM which has a RAMdisk that mounts /var/log, and then periodically (based on schedule, defaulting to daily) flushes it to /var/hdd.log/
- Havoc 5y ago
  Agreed. It's an ugly hack to a problem that should not exist in the first place. Normal level writes to os disk should not be a OS fatal situational in <year. No matter how you look at this it is not awesome.
908B64B197 5y ago
Use it in read-only mode and have durable writes go to the cloud. Better, have all your software already packaged to the image you'll flash on the SD card. https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/ https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/
- mark-r 5y ago
  I recently spent a little time at a company that used an embedded Pi in their product. It had to have a lot of data on hand that needed refreshing daily, with an unreliable network, so everything had to be local. Their biggest problem was SD corruption.

rubicks 5y ago

What happens when one of these devices is admitted as trial evidence? Is there a hardware root of trust that can be used for cryptographic verification? Has anyone succeeded in doing trusted boot on a Raspberry Pi?

tyingq 5y ago
Seems overkill since you could just hand your badge to a buddy and have them clock you in. There's no fingerprint scans, etc, involved here.
- mistasteve 5y ago
  yeah it's a step away from honor system pretty much
pjerem 5y ago
Most computers on this planet have the same problem. Even your ISP could technically create and provide false logs to incriminate you if they wanted.

jacknews 5y ago

This looks to me like modern tech supporting antiquated working practices.

krzyk 5y ago

Is tracking job entry/leave that popular nowadays? I get it that there were punchcards for factory workers previously, but city workers? Is this US-only thing or popular around the world also?

dEnigma 5y ago
The two office jobs I worked in Austria both had me punch in and out.
nix23 5y ago
Sometimes it's law (like in Switzerland).

nix23 5y ago

Just a little tip for the writer of the Article, give your employees their own touch-pen. Otherwise every employee will touch the exact same spot on the display...a big potential victory for Corona..or every other germ (had the same problem)

daniellarusso 5y ago

I finally looked at the article and that is bit over-engineered in my opinion. My favorite timeclock had a two-row character lcd character display, membrane keypad for digits and maybe 5 additional function buttons: clock in, clock out, lunch in, lunch out, and admin-mode. We used the last 6 digits of our SS# to clock in and out with. It had a serial interface. Use an Arduino, and you can add the serial display, keypad if needed, serial rfid or barcode scanner, and ethernet or wifi.

hiidrew 5y ago

shout out my university town <3

wtf_is_up 5y ago

The package name starting with 'in.' instead of 'gov.in.' bugs me.