As it is clear from the name, in this project we are going to mark the attendance using RFID system. It is better to make an electronic system for marking attendance rather than making a heap of registers.

RFID is an acronym for Radio Frequency Identification. RFID is a system that overcomes the drawbacks or demerits of other electronic indentifying systems including barcode systems, optical character recognition system, smart cards and biometrics (voice, fingerprint and retina scanning) because it does not require line of sight communication. RFID system consists of RFID reader and RFID tags (RFID cards).

In this project RFID tags and RFID reader are used for marking attendance of a person and also it records the amount of time, a person spends in office. We can also use this project for marking students' attendance in a college. RFID is interfaced with microcontroller using serial port. Whenever a RFID tag or card comes in the range of RFID module, the RFID reader detects it and sends the unique code to the microcontroller on serial port. Microcontroller marks the attendance according to the information provided by RFID reader and also records the time at which a person has shown the RFID tag or card and at the leaving time when someone shows his/her card then microcontroller again records the time of leaving and calculates that how much time a person has spent in office. EEPROM is interfaced with microcontroller to maintain record of data. Also we can interface it with PC to make a record of attendance.

A 20x4 LCD is interfaced with microcontroller to display different messages throughout this process. IC DS1307 (Real Time Clock) is also interfaced with microcontroller. It will work as a digital watch.