Scott’s Ramblings

The churches in my area recently held a camp meeting, and my brother was in charge of one of the kids’ groups. He asked me to design an attendance system that involved badges with the kids’ photos and a barcode on them. They would scan those badges to gain entry into the “top secret lab” and us staff would have an automatic, accurate attendance system. (From comments I heard after the event, this system also helped give our program an additional “quality polish” as the badges turned out well.)

The system that emerged is called BadgeEntry. After successfully using it for our event, I’ve decided to release it to the public.

With school starting soon, it’s a little late for VBS use, but I’m still looking for people to test it and provide feedback. While any comments, bug reports, and criticisms are welcome, I’m especially interested in feedback about the install process, documentation, and user interface.

Also, BadgeEntry should run on Windows and MacOS, in addition to Linux. However, since I’ve switched completely to Linux, I haven’t been able to test those other platforms. (I wrote the Windows documentation from memory as I wasn’t able to test it, so I hope it’s accurate.)

You can find out more on the BadgeEntry website, which is also the place to go to download BadgeEntry.