Just new to Arduino and the Forum and my first post unfortunately is asking for advice.
I have a custom data acquisition system that was created for our work.
At the moment our employee tracking is all paper based and I have been asked to find a system to automatically put employee tracking into our system.
I have looked at proprietary Time and Attendance systems and for what we need these are too expensive and will not be able to directly connect to my acquisition system.
One of our employees suggested Arduino, so I signed up to ask what I need and see if an Arduino could do the job.
So what I want is a networkable device that can read RFID tags and write to either an SQL database or even a simple CSV file on the network that logs the RFID ID and the time it was scanned, maybe a couple of LEDs, one red and one green to show if the scan was successful or not, or maybe a small color LCD that show the current time and tells you the ID that was scanned.
If this is possible what would I need to get a prototype going, I am happy to work through this just as long as I have what I need to get it going.
This does not sound like an Arduino project to me, and it would be quite challenging for a beginner.
However there are a number of forum posts from people who have interfaced RFID readers to Arduinos. You might take a glance through them to see what they did.
Part of designing a complex system like you are suggesting, is to identify the various points of failure and what are the results of that failure, then design ways to mitigate the failure.
I agree with the suggestion to look for a commercial product. A business needs a system that can be maintained and upgraded and which does not depend on the skill and knowledge of a single individual. How would the business manage if you were injured or taken ill, or left their employment?
If you really do want to pursue a DIY solution then I suggest that you do it on a cheap laptop as you will have a lot more programming tools available. I'm sure you can get a USB RFID reader that can be connected to a PC.
