Celsius
About the project
I mentor a high school robotics team in my free time outside of work, and we had an interesting problem to solve regarding collecting student attendance data. We needed a system that was extremely simple for students to use and would allow for data to be easily tabulated and processed.
The name Celsius was born from my other mentor's slight addiction to the energy drink. It is a three-part system that includes a physical NFC tap terminal, a backend in Google Sheets, and a phone app to register new students.
I built the NFC terminal from scratch with an ESP32, OLED display, NFC reader, and simple beeper. The device is enclosed in a 3D printed case I also designed, mounted to the wall, and powered. Simple NFC stickers are given to students and registered into the system with our phone app.
Students must tap in and out of the lab with the system. The terminal uses the Google Sheets API to relay data to the database. Google Sheets was chosen so that data can be easily read and evaluated by teachers that are non-technical.
This system is currently being evaluated to be used across the entire 1600+ students on campus for class attendance as well.
There is limited media and GitHub access for this project due to FERPA laws on the protection of student data.
