Wi-Fi Attendance System in the IoT Era

Traditionally, attendance is marked manually by students writing down their name on a paper. This whole process wastes some of lecture time and might even get lost. Maintaining the attendance of the students in an institution is a hefty task. This project aims at designing a smart attendance system that automatically monitors and manages attendance of the students in an institution efficiently. The system is developed with an Arduino ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller deployed in the class room. Further, Wi-Fi communication modules was used to make convenient communication between the student's devices e.g. phone or laptop and the ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller. Database was created where the attendance submitted will be logged and saved. Internet is utilized to transfer the information collected by the micro controller to the database and from the database to the frontend web page GUI graphical user interface. The students and admin will make one-time registration and subsequently establishing a Wi-Fi connection between the student's device and the microcontroller in the class to mark an attendance. This system will arrange the attendance in a list with a real time timestamp and save it to database, and also be accessible to the lecturer/Admin over internet any time with uses of web browser e.g. Google chrome through the front end graphic user interface (GUI). This system is useful to reduce manual method of attendance by teachers and to alleviate the spread of COVID-19.