Development Phases

From Contact-Tap Prototype to Contactless Presence

The hardest part of this project, antennas that reliably detect presence without a tap, is deliberately last. The build is staged so each phase produces something usable and testable on its own.

Phase 1 reflects the current working prototype. This is a hardware rollout roadmap, a different axis from the research cycles in the Research Proposal. See Iterations for how the project's framing itself changed.

Roadmap

flowchart LR
	P1["Phase 1
Contact-Tap Prototype
current"] -.paused, see below.-> LATER["Later, if data
supports it:
UHF, room-scale"]

Explore Each Phase

Current, WorkingPhase 1: Contact-Tap Prototype

A CrowPi board, one scan pad, and a Flask + SQLite backend proving the core read-log-display loop.

Later, If Data Supports It

The Research Proposal explicitly pauses this hardware work until the research cycles show which input is actually worth deepening: "None of it answers a research question until data shows RFID is the right input." Kept here as a condensed record of the plan, not an active workstream.

Stage	What it was
Classroom pilot	Hardening the tap system for a real class period: a deck of RFID-stickered playing cards (one per student), a production backend and admin dashboard, real auth, off SQLite.
UHF doorway transition	Swap the tap pad for contactless UHF reads at a single door-table rig, tags mounted on laptops instead of tapped, and the start of a Camera Events contract with the face-scanning system.
Full room-scale presence	Front and back door UHF detection, full RFID and camera correlation, the complete presence-state machine (present, tardy, stepped out, left early, opted out, tamper) running live in the trial room.

Project TeamRuta Sirdeshmukh, Vibha Mandayam, Kush Shah

Phase 1, Working Prototype

View Repo