Preview of the classroom and antenna

unlocking the classroom

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UHF classroom attendance experiment

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your view of the room

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Preparing the scene…

Computer Science and Information Systems · Honours

UHF classroom attendance.

My Honours project develops and evaluates a prototype UHF RFID classroom attendance system, aiming to reduce the time and deliberate interaction needed by paper registers and one-at-a-time card scanning.

Passive UHF sticker tags → directional panel antenna → SparkFun M7E Hecto reader → Raspberry Pi 5 → Touch Display 2

The reader communicates through the C implementation of the ThingMagic Mercury API. The Pi’s Python/Flask application manages sessions, filters repeated detections into unique entries, and produces attendance CSVs for local-network download via QR code.

Developed iteratively using Design Science Research, the prototype was evaluated for attendance speed, detection accuracy, successful and missed reads, setup time, and overall reliability.

Final classroom reader setting: 27 dBm. The coverage guide shows the reported approximately 7 m × 7 m area; the animated waves are illustrative.