Bar code scanner

This is the big one. We want to develop software which will operate a bar code scanner and record it as an event (attendance) in civicrm. Each school will have a scanner. The attendance will have to record the time and place (which school). Preferably I'd like the student to sign in and out. However as they'll often forget to check out I'd like it to attend them for an hour as the default. Eventually we'd like to be able to graph attendance by number of hours, show a student total number of hours attended, hours attended between given ranks, etc.

The attendance screen should be built in a way that it locks down the computer. It cannot be exited without a password. I've suggested using a browser building software which I've used before www.browserbob.com It has this functionality built in already and other features which we may find useful.

When the student signs in I'd like to be able to display some of their stats to them and maybe even sing them a birthday song if it's their birthday.

I'd like the student to be able to sign in using their card, by typing in their student ID number, or by typing their name (last, first)

We currently produce the cards using a martial arts software called MAS (martial arts software, how creative) which sucks big rocks. We hate it and want to dump it. Hence this site. So we'll eventually need a solution for producing the cards.

So I've had my say. Why don't you guys talk about this. Between the two of you you know far more than me on how to make it work.

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pasted from an e-mail to Alex

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There is a link called civicrm. I don't have it fully set up
> > yet but in there I will have an event which would be an
> > attendance. I'll need the scanner to write to that field in
> > the civicrm database. What I envision in that the scanner
> > will be hooked to a computer fully dedicated to scanning in
> > students. Really what it will be displaying is a web page
> > with an input field for the student number to go in. I'd
> > also like the input field to accept student names typed in
> > (in case someone forgets their card). The page can also
> > display cool stuff like the students picture and maybe some
> > stats on them or whatever but we can work on that later
> > after the basic functionality is set up.
> >
> > I can create a browser specifically for that which cannot be
> > closed out without a password. That way we don't have any
> > problems with people shutting it down to use the computer
> > like they do now. There's a program I've used before to
> > build a browser. It works well. I have a copy of the
> > software here. I'll probably have to upgrade to get the new
> > cool features.
> > www.browserbob.com
> >
> > I think I'd like to use a better scanner than last time
> > though. That last one was kind of a piece of crap. The one
> > we use here works pretty good. It's a
> > symbol LS1902C-e000
> >
> > You can get to the databases and take a look at
> > www.shoushu.org/netadmin
> > shoushuc
> > nastybeasty