bamed.org

Another big project I’ve been working on that we wanted launched with the new worship center is a children’s check-in system.  I actually started research months ago, looking to replace our entire church database to something more usable, and find a good children’s check-in system along with it, but after months of research I was told there wasn’t $$ in the budget to get something before the new worship center opened, so we had to make do with what we have.  And I should say what we have as far as a children’s check-in system is woefully inadequate by itself, but after lots of brainstorming we came up with something that I hope works alright, but is still mostly manual.  The core of our new check-in system are photo id cards with barcodes on the back.  We took a picture of every family and collected some information.  Then we made their id cards.  The front has the family photo and the names of those who are allowed to pick up the children.  The picture should also include the children, plus whoever is allowed to pick them up.  The back has a barcode for every child.  Our church management system then allows us to use barcode scanners and label printers with their attendance software.  A parent walks up to our homemade kiosks and scans each barcode on the back of their id cards, and in return get a name badge for each child.

Some of the problems with this system.  It doesn’t accurately track attendance.  Yeah, that’s right.  We use their attendance software, but we can’t use it to accurately track attendance.  The reason is the way we’re using it we can’t choose what class a child is attending.  So we can’t tell if they’re here for the 9:15 Sunday School, or the 11:00 children’s church, or if they’re here at 8:00 with the early crowd.  So attendance is still done manually.

The other problem with the system is that it times out if it’s not used after a short amount of time.  In other words the system has to be restarted between services.

There’s a few other nuisances, but nothing I can’t work around.  Overall, I’m not satisfied with what we have, but it’s what we have for now so I’m doing my best to make it work.

What have I been up to?  Well, a lot!  I should probably recap some of what’s been going on over the past few months.  It’s been quite busy.  February 17th we had our first service in our new worship center.  It all went very well, but there was lots of work put into it in recent months to pull it all off.

One of the bigger projects I found myself working on was the video announcement system.  Basically somebody got the idea that we’d go buy some TV’s and then we could have really cool video announcements shown around the building.  So somebody bought some TV’s and had them hung around the building, then asked me to take care of the rest.  OK, I’m a geek, I don’t dispute that, but I’m a computer/network geek NOT an A/V geek.  I had no idea what I was doing when this project got started, because I’ve never messed with this kind of stuff before.

So we had to figure out how we were going to distribute a video feed from one computer to 6 HDTV’s + the 2 projectors in the new worship center + the old projector in the gym.  The biggest problem was that the longest cable run was nearly 300ft. and most of what we tried the signal degraded too much to be usable over that distance.  The other problem was budget.  There wasn’t a budget for this part of the project because it was assumed we could just buy some TV’s and have a video announcement system.

So I researched online, shopped around, asked lots of questions, and ended up buying these passive component baluns,  and connected them to these distribution amps.  This way we only had to run CAT5 cable to all the TV’s/projectors, and plug everything in.  The computer running the show has component outputs so it all works very nicely.  The only real problem is that the TV’s and projectors are all different sizes with different native resolutions, so the video feed doesn’t fill up the whole screen at all of the outputs, but that’s what we get for buying the TV’s first.

As far as the video feed, at the moment it’s just two AVI files.  One with the regular video announcement loop, and the second has the loop + a countdown timer to when the service starts.  I’m ashamed to say that at the moment the timing for these AVI’s is being handled by a Windows Media Playlist.  By the time everything else was put together there wasn’t any $$ for any software, so we made do with what we had.  I’m trying out some different trial programs, and hope we can come up with a less ugly solution soon, but for now it is what it is, and from the user’s viewpoint it looks good, and that’s what really matters.  At first I wasn’t sure a countdown time to the service was a good idea, but it works.  When it’s 5 minutes till the service starts everyone standing around in the halls looks up at the video and starts moving into the service.  We’ve always had trouble getting everyone in to start on time, so I think it’s doing it’s job well.

Just in case you haven’t seen this already: