1. Contact details: 1300 733 013 | rudy.moniago@dmcom.com.au | www.dmcom.com.au 1
Wireless Name Tag and Attendance System (NTAS)
2013
Client
CityLife Church, Melbourne Australia
Situation
CityLife has over 9,000 members and runs children programs on the weekends that take place in
several different rooms and children need to be checked in and out of each room or activity.
Originally the church required parents to register their child in the office. The office staff then made
a laminated ID card which was placed each weekend at the appropriate activity room along with a
sign in sheet. Parents were responsible for signing their child in. Staff then had to manually enter
attendance in the database.
The key problems with the original system were:
- Making ID cards could take two weeks.
- Placing cards and sign-up sheets at each activity room every weekend takes time.
- Not all parents were signing in their children which presented a safety issue and there was no
control on who picked the child up.
- Entering data from the sign-in sheets into the database was time consuming.
Solution
DMCOM designed and built a wireless name tag and attendance system. This required making a
custom PCB for the RS232 to WiFi adapter using Cadsoft Eagle PCB design software and packaging
the components and power supply in a suitable housing. This adapter connects to an android tablet
with a portable Sato printer. DMCOM wrote the attendance program for the tablet using Delphi XE5,
and the printer program using SBPL (Sato Barcode Printer Language).
The attendance register based on the tablet allows parents or volunteer helpers to quickly and
simply sign their child in and generate a name tag for the child and a collection label for the parents
that they must present when picking up their child. Attendance is automatically saved to the
database.
Benefits to CityLife
 Significantly reduced staff time which helps reduce pressure on limited resources
 Greater security of children
 Increased accuracy of attendance and ability to generate informative reports
 Fast development time, 2 months
 Customised for the specific needs of CityLife
 Flexible, can be expanded for other activities, easy to maintain and due to no cables, the printer
and tablet can be easily carried to other rooms or tables.
 The attendance system can be used offsite (eg field trips, camps) using a pocket WiFi.