question about attendance machines

[Johanes]

so quick question... i got curious as any newbie programmer would. So im here, making a "simple" program for generating attendance sheet from the records off of an attendance machine (its just my own dummy data).

So here i am just programming away then i got to thinking, I see an RJ45 port on this attendance machine... and i see a network/server options in the menu... how could one get raw data from this machine. im just curious what kind of protocol or something to emulate a request for this machine to spew out the records...

 

i tried searching about this machine and similar types but google is being a little B-word...

anyone know a thing or two about how these kinds of machine work?

 

[Eigenvektor]

You should include the type of machine (manufacturer, model) you're talking about, since it will very likely vary based on that (no experience with that type of machine myself though)

 

It might be as simple as some type of web server returning JSON records, but it could just as well be something completely custom. It may or may not require authentication, encryption, … the software you're writing would need to be able to make network request, but what type of request depends entirely how the server works.

[Johanes]

yeah i was afraid of that... it was just a thought that came to me while working on this other project. im starting my journey on Linux software and just had a thought on how i could integrate this machine to work on a Linux machine. it just sucks that i cant find any relevant starting information on how i would go about probing this machine on how to make it do what i want from it.

[Skipple]

5 minutes ago, Johanes said:

yeah i was afraid of that... it was just a thought that came to me while working on this other project. im starting my journey on Linux software and just had a thought on how i could integrate this machine to work on a Linux machine. it just sucks that i cant find any relevant starting information on how i would go about probing this machine on how to make it do what i want from it.

What is the make and model of the machine you are working on? 

[wanderingfool2]

9 hours ago, Johanes said:

yeah i was afraid of that... it was just a thought that came to me while working on this other project. im starting my journey on Linux software and just had a thought on how i could integrate this machine to work on a Linux machine. it just sucks that i cant find any relevant starting information on how i would go about probing this machine on how to make it do what i want from it.

It's like what @Eigenvektor had said; provide the make/model of the machine.  At minimum a picture, so that we could at least try identifying it.

 

The starting information would be the make or model of it...because if you are talking about it having an rj45 plug and menu items there must be something that you could see that would help us identify it.

 

From there, especially if you post it, you will likely get at least people pointing the right direction...at the moment it's like asking "I have a graphics card, how many fps will I get"...we can't help without details to identify it.

 

Anyways, once you get the model, I would normally just search [model] api or [model] documenation and go from there.  If lucky enough, there will be someone who already has done something similar.

 

At least for time punch machines, I found most actually connect to a backend server (or the company who provides it's server).