Design and development of a portable attendance / response-ware system

Abstract

The university regularly holds large scale public events, which can greatly benefit from a platform that the public audience can use to provide feedback and ask questions in real time, similar to the popular web based ResponseWare software. However, this project seeks to design and develop a low-cost portable system of such that does not require access to pre-existing infrastructure such as internet connectivity and power supply. Additionally, the proposed system should fulfil the requirements of consistency, scalability and fault tolerance. The system designed in this project uses a peer-to-peer architecture model, and is implemented by using multiple Raspberry Pi single-board computers acting as low powered mobile computing nodes. The B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced (batman-adv) module was used to form a mesh network connecting all nodes in the cluster and Apache Cassandra was used as a distributed data storage solution that offered high availability and scalability. A Python web server was also developed to serve requests from the non-mesh client devices. The final system was shown to have achieved all objectives and requirements during testing.