NFC-Printing

Purpose of the application

This application was developed during the internship in Innopolis University. The task was to implement a system that would help university employees to print documents more effectively using their NFC-cards. This implies that any printer that is existent in the database of the printers should have NFC-reader connected to it.

Structure of the application

The application consists of three parts:

• Virtual IPP printer
• NFC-Reader
• Listener of NFC-Reader requests

Virtual IPP printer

Is actually a server that behaves as a printer so that other devices could send files to print on it.

NFC-Reader

Is the only piece of hardware we designed. It sends requests that contain reader id and card id to the server.

Listener of NFC-Reader requests

Processes requests from NFC-Reader and sends the documents to printing module.

Stack of technologies

• flask
• pyodbc

Installation

Requirements

• python3
• pip3
• nodejs (quick installation and project usage guide)

The process

• Download the repository from GitHub (is made through Git Bash)

git clone https://github.com/reconrus/NFC-Printing

• Intall requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Follow the guide to install nodejs
• Launch the MS SQL Database if it is not already started
• Add printers to the server manually
• Add printers and NFC-Readers to the database
• Turn off Windows firewall for ports 3000 (Virtual IPP printer) and 5000 (Listener of NFC-Reader requests)
• Install Adobe Acrobat Pro and set it as default app for PostScript files
• You can find information about NFC Reader here.

Running

You have to start both Virtual IPP printer and Listener of NFC-Reader requests separately.

• Instructions to launch Virtual IPP printer were described here.
• To start the listener you have to type the following in the administrator cmd from /server folder (the code is for windows)

python.exe main.py