This year's roadmap

[mhmatthall]

Why bother?

badgeman is still a WIP personal project and so it's not yet really at all transferable or easily customisable. However, there isn't anything like it out there so I'm keeping it public because I hope it serves at least as some crappy starting point for someone.

On that note, I want to make public my intentions for developing the software this year, so you know what to expect. I've written below about what I'm actually using badgeman for, and what's needed of it this year.

What it's being used for

As I said, it's a personal project -- but it does have a genuine use! I managed to get the computer science department at Swansea University to shell out the money for the whole 'digital name badge' project and so there's now 120 badges and a whole load of networking hardware currently just chilling in a box under my desk. So, I kind of have a moral responsibility to get this working to some professional standard.

The litmus test for this project's success will be in a full-scale deployment at the department's annual conference, the Festival of Ideas (FoI). This year's FoI is being held mid-September 2023, so this is the deadline to implement and test a full-scale working minimum viable product.

Necessary changes by September

The unambitious goal for this year's FoI is to afford the following basic user journey for each attendee:

• Arrive at conference, sign-in, and pick up a badge
• Power on badge, and be presented with connection instructions
  • Connect mobile device to specified WLAN
  • Open browser and navigate to badge editor website
  • Login to badge editor using credentials displayed on badge
  • Input details into editor to be displayed on badge:
    • Name
    • Pronouns
    • Affiliation
    • Custom message
    • Profile picture
  • Save details and watch the badge automatically refresh its display
• Be able to power off/on badge and have details retained/edited

There are also some major code issues that need fixing, because I'm a big JS noob:

• There's still no working driver for the Waveshare B/W display modules! Uhoh!
• Ensure project is reproducible; unsure whether current repo installation instructions actually work
  • This includes adding automation of dependency installation, like having MongoDB set itself up automatically
• Introduce some sort of style guide or convention, currently there's none (I hate JS)
  • Slim down the repo to bare essentials
  • Add some github automation for enforcing conventions
• Refactor all front-end code to use React Hooks
• Rework badgeboy code to simply receive and display images
  • Limitations in the e-paper displays makes on-badge image generation effectively impossible
  • Decision was made to have host server generate all badge imagery
• Adjust subnet to support more clients (we're reaching X.X.X.X/24 capacity with 120 badges plus attendee mobile devices)
• Review all dependencies to ensure future compatibility with containerisation (i.e. replace dhcpsrv with something that can be shoved in a Docker)
• Make the badge editor easier to get to on attendee mobile devices
  • My knowledge of web servers is terrible, so there's learning required here

Stretch goals

This MVP is super boring, however, and doesn't offer much more to attendees than a paper name badge. Really, for this year's FoI we want to see the following additions:

• Sexy UX
  • Better 'out-of-box' experience facilitated by a QR code to automatically launch and initialise the badge
    • Fall-back would need to be provided
  • A professional, responsive, fast web UI for editing badges
    • Theme, branding, and CSS congruent with the rest of the FoI branding
    • The badge editor should show a live preview of all changes
• Centralised badge management
  • Creation of a visualisation to be displayed to all attendees based on badge details
  • Creation of a centralised badge admin page
    • Displays all registered badges, their details, and online status
      • Can modify badge details remotely
      • Can reset misbehaving badges
    • Can push temporary messages to all badges
      • Can send announcements to all badges for notification of events starting, for example
      • Can send targeted messages/images to badges to facilitate group activities

Future changes

• Containerisation is the single biggest thing I want to have for badgeman so that it can be deployed simply and easily
  • All you should have to do is spin up a Docker image, edit a config file, and you're away
  • This will probably require modularity or at least better standardisation as to give badgeman a chance at being compatible with different network infrastructure, OSes, client devices, etc.
  • I need to learn Docker lol
• Theme, branding, and CSS should be able to be easily set for each conference
• Physical interactivity with badges through hardware support (e.g. add some buttons and now we can host a quiz/poll using the badges as a remote)
• Colour display support for 3-colour, 2-bit, and full-RGB displays