Design and Implementation of a Fingerprint-Based Student Attendance System

Each tertiary educational institution is required to keep track of, and take attendance from its students during lecture sessions. Over the years, this attendance system has faced numerous challenges and issues regarding its procedure and accuracy. These problems have included the cumbersome nature of paper sheets used for recording attendance and the manipulation of attendance records by dishonest students. The goal of this work is to design and implement a fingerprint-based attendance system for tracking students’ time and attendance aids in easing these difficulties. Using biometrics, the student is precisely identified by the attendance system using fingerprint biometric characteristics. In addition, the system produces a report that provides the percentage of attendance or absence for a specific student during a semester. To achieve this, a combination of components including a fingerprint RS305 module, an atmega328P microcontroller, a red, green and blue (RGB) light-emitting diode (LED), a liquid crystal display (LCD), along with a PC, were employed. The final work was simulated using proteus8 before it was built and tested. The software used in this work was produced using visual basic.net and Arduino programming. The developed biometric student attendance system was able to register and capture students’ attendance record for a particular course; and at the end of each semester, a detailed report showing how many classes were held for that semester, what percentage was captured as present and absent is shown for each student of the class.