Smart University Card

Abstract

By nature, technology and advancements do not rest. One might assume that almost every kind of technology now exists in today’s world. Yet, that assumption will surely be far away from the truth. As Albert Einstein has very well stated, “What we do not know is much more than what we know.” Therefore, it is necessary to keep working in the direction to better the already existing technology and to discover new horizons. Such is the case with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. With the advent of RFID technology in the 20th century, it opened doors for a vast number of possibilities and technological development. Since then, the RFID technology has become widespread worldwide and is employed for the multitude of reasons ranging from electronic toll collection to being used in e-passports. The key purpose of this project is to make use of RFID technology in order to combine data logging and transaction billing to make a multi-purpose system. RFID technology is not well known to the localities of Pakistan as it is scarce to witness RFID based systems in the country. One of the aims of this project is to hopefully implement a multi-purpose RFID based system in the campus of MCS, NUST. It can be observed that the campus does not have any sort of automated entry system to keep logs of the students who have entered the premises. Along with this, the cafeteria in MCS has suffered losses in the past due to students not paying back the lent amount. Also, keeping records of bills manually on paper is a tough job and is more prone to human error. Smart University Card is designed to tackle the highlighted issues. It is a RFID based system that allow students access into the university premises, logs their entries and notifies their guardians. In addition, this system also has the capability to carry out transactions with the credit present in the Smart University Card at the cafeteria setup. The data that is logged at the entrance and the transactions that took place at the cafeteria can be viewed via the Android application. Implementing the Smart University Card does not only make life easier for the students. It adds security to the campus as the guardians are notified of their child entering the premises. Also, the data logs can be accessed in case of an emergency to backtrack the student. Along with this, the Smart University Card setup eases a lot of workload for the staff, that comes with manually recording the cafeteria bills. The result is reduction of paper-usage, well-kept transaction records and an efficient environment.