A Radio Frequency System for Smart Attendance in Schools

Abstract

Attendance is necessary in schools for curbing staff and students abseitism and lateness to classes. Traditional method of taking attendance where students write and sign on a sheet of paper is time consuming and labour intensive. This work presents smart attendance system that eases the way attendance is taken in lecture halls. The system  integrates database with hardware components such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) card, RFID reader, I2C driver, display unit and Node Microcontroller Unit (NodeMCU) which has lower power consumption and better processing speed than Arduino microctontroller commonly used in the literature. Performance test conducted shows that the system performs its functions satisfactorily. The system reads and transfers students’ data to the database in 3 seconds. In addition, students are asked to evaluate the performance of the sytem in terms of ease of use, functionality, efficiency, friendly user interface and speed of data transfer to the database. It is found that a good number of the students rate the ease of use, functionality, friendliness in the user interface and speed of data transfer excellent while more than average of the students rate the efficiency of the system good. The system is recomended for use in schools