Meenakshi Jalan
Independent Researcher
India
Abstract
This manuscript presents the design and evaluation of an RFID‐based attendance system tailored for educational institutes as of 2015. The system comprises passive RFID tags issued to students, networked RFID readers positioned at classroom entrances, a microcontroller interface, and a centralized MySQL database. The attendance event is captured when the RFID reader antenna detects a student’s tag within a 10–20 cm range; data are timestamped and transmitted via RS‐232 to a PIC18F4520 microcontroller, then forwarded over Ethernet to the server. A statistical analysis of attendance records from two pilot classrooms over a 12‐week semester is included. Five research questions guide the study: reliability of tag reads, system scalability, data integrity, user acceptance, and cost‐effectiveness. Research gaps identified include limited evaluation of reader‐to‐tag distance effects, insufficient studies on database concurrency under peak loads, and lack of comparative cost analyses of RFID versus barcode systems in 2015. Methodology involves system hardware assembly, software development in C and PHP, pilot deployment, data collection, and statistical evaluation using ANOVA. Results indicate an overall tag‐read success rate of 97.3 %, negligible database error rate (<0.5 %), and positive user feedback. The study concludes that the proposed system meets accuracy and reliability requirements for mid‐sized institutes and recommends further work on multi‐reader synchronization and energy‐harvesting tag research.
Keywords RFID, Attendance System, Educational Institutes, PIC18F4520, MySQL
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