Automating Sign-in Process Using Python, OpenCV, and QR Code

Background

On January 5, 1858, Waterbury native Ezra J. Warner invented the first US can opener. The idea of storing food in cans dates back almost 50 years earlier when Peter Durand of England patented a can made of wrought iron with a tin lining. - https://connecticuthistory.org/the-first-us-can-opener-today-in-history-2/

For decades, people accepted that chisel and hammer is all they need to open a can. No problem to be solved here.

Fast forward to 2023, we still see people struggling with recording attendance of weekly reoccurring meetings. We don’t need to invent anything new for this project, we just need to use what we already have access to, which is a lot!

This project is part of a larger automation effort to streamline the process; Gotta Start Somewhere.

Software

The code will start by looking for a folder named QR in the same location as Python file. The existence of this folder indicates that user needs to get QR Code for attendee names listed in QR.txt also in the same location. Each line in that file will be one attendee name and will result in one QR Code to be affixed to the existing name tag. This functionality has been deprecated as we ended up using MS Word’s Mail Merge to create labels similar to this video:

If the QR folder does not exist, the Python code will commence the scanning process by playing the intro to Super Mario Bros. to make it interesting to our students. We start video capture from OpenCV and wait until the user presses Esc to quit scanning. If we detect a QR Code in the scanned video, we will save that text in QRExcel.xlsx. If the Excel file does not exist, we will create it and we will also try to find the attendee's name before we add it to the file. The attendance will be marked by time stamp in today’s date column. Again, if today’s date already exists, we will use that column, otherwise, we will start a new column with this scan and use the same column for the remaining scans that day.

A successful scan will result in a coin sound effect from Super Mario Bros. and duplicate scan will give a bump sound effect. A different theme can be used for sound effects by replacing Duplicate.wav, End.wav, LockedFile.wav, Start.wav, and Success.wav files.

Finally, we used pyinstaller to create an executable to run on the attendance recording laptop.