NFC Voting Machine

Uses an Intel Galileo as a voting machine, based on NFC tags and readers:

• Vote can have as many values as there are plugged NFC readers.
• Each tag detection results in a vote, its description is sent through MQTT (... vote uniqueness must be handled by the server-side)

This project is the continuation of the work of Antoine GERVAIL and Amine ZIAN­CHERIF during their Master 2 at Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble.

The original README file (in French) describes the architecture of the project.

The original project is available at twane/nfc_voting

Dependencies

Galileo

For the Galileo you need to use a Linux distribution (not the built-in one).

• Python
• PyUSB
• Python-nfcpy
• Paho Python MQTT Client
• Pelix/iPOPO

Server

WARNING: The server part is not maintained in this fork

• Python
• Python-nfcpy
• Python-pygame
• Paho Python MQTT Client
• NodeJS
• MongoDB

Installation

System configuration

In order to use the NFC reader without problems, it is recommend to follow the recommendations from the nfcpy documentation.

From http://nfcpy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/get-started.html#installation

Things may not immediately work on Linux for two reasons: The reader might be claimed by the Linux NFC subsystem available since Linux 3.1 and root privileges may be required to access the device.

To prevent a reader being used by the NFC kernel driver add a blacklist entry in '/etc/modprobe.d/', for example the following line works for the PN533 based SCL3711:

$ echo "blacklist pn533" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nfc.conf

Root permissions are usually needed for the USB readers and 'sudo python' is an easy fix, however not quite convenient and potentially dangerous.

A better solution is to add a udev rule and make the reader accessible to a normal user, like the following rules would allow members of the 'plugdev' group to access an SCL-3711 or RC-S380 if stored in '/etc/udev/rules.d/nfcdev.rules'.

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04e6",

ATTRS{idProduct}=="5591", GROUP="plugdev" # SCM SCL-3711

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c",

ATTRS{idProduct}=="06c1", GROUP="plugdev" # Sony RC-S380

NFC readers can be plugged once the system has been configured.

Voting Machine

WARNING: Set up the date time on the Galileo before starting the installation. An incorrect time will prevent HTTPS downloads by wget and pip.

Go in some directory on the Galileo's SD card and run the following commands:

# Project source code
wget https://github.com/tcalmant/nfc_voting/archive/master.zip
unzip nfc_voting-master.zip

# Go into the Galileo folder
cd nfc_voting-master/galileo

# Paho
pip install paho-mqtt

# Pelix/iPOPO
pip install iPOPO

# libusb (0.1.4 or 1.0.0)
opkg install libusb-1.0-0

# PyUSB (1.x): --pre stands for pre-release: PyUSB 1.0 is still in beta
pip install --pre pyusb

# nfcpy
wget https://launchpad.net/nfcpy/0.9/0.9.1/+download/nfcpy-0.9.1.tar.gz
tar xf nfcpy-0.9.1.tar.gz
mv nfcpy-0.9.1/nfc .
rm -r nfcpy-0.9.1 nfcpy-0.9.1.tar.gz

The next step is to generate the configuration of the vote, using the make_config.py script. This will generate a file named vote.ini.

Finally, you can run the vote machine running the vote_machine.py script. It will first associate a NFC reader to a vote value, then the users will be able to vote with their tags.