Wait-a-bit

The simplest waiting line management app - one UI to enter an order number, one dashboard to display the number (plus a history of previous numbers).

Also, support for a custom HW Keypad (project Luncheonmeat).

The numbers are expected to be assigned separately (manually).

UI panel for number input and Dashboard displaying the call queue.

Implementation is a HTML5 and a simple server (Python/Asyncio) serving both UI screen and the dashboards.

UI screen and dashboards are synchronized over websockets, system allows many UI screens and many dashboards, but the queue is shared.

UI panel is optimized for a tablet/touchscreen - with swipes and long-press events.

The system has a screen-saver/session timeout option which would dim the dashboard and erase the queue after a selected time, to prevent screen burn-in. Screen-saver can be also enabled manually from the UI. Any new call input deactivates the screen-saver.

Requirements

• Python 3.5+
• Chrome/Chromium browser (desktop or mobile) - it's probably working on other browsers as well, but was not tested.

Installation

Just install the package from GitHub (assuming pip is for Python3):

$ sudo pip install git+https://github.com/calcite/waitabit.git

Usage

Running the server

The server is started from command-line:

$ waitabit --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 --queue_size 6 --session_timeout 3600

The server command has several options apart of mandatory host/port:

• queue_size is the length of the order call history, which is displayed on the dashboard.

• session_timeout is the timeout (in seconds) after which the session is closed by clearing the queue and activating the screen-saver.

  Set to 0 to prevent session timeout/screen-saver activation.

• keypad_port option can be used to specify the Luncheonmeat keypad uart device path (such as /dev/ttyUSB0).

Full help is also available with waitabit --help.

Using the app

The server provides a web-page which links to the UI panel and Dashboard screen.

The dashboard screen doesn't need any user operation, it's just displaying the queue.

The user input screen is simple, the basic usage is explained on the image below:

Development

The backend is a standard python package, so you can install it with the usual:

$ python setup.py develop

The frontend is written in Vue.js and can be run with the webpack development server. In the waitabit\frontend folder, run:

$ npm install
$ npm run dev

It will serve the developer view on localhost:8080, but it expects to have a running backend running on port 8000, so don't forget to have one instance of waitabit running when starting the npm dev server.

Currently there is no CI set up for this project, so if you wan't to bundle the distributable JavaScript together with the waitabit python package (as are all the releases), you need to build the distributable package by running:

$ npm run build

Licence

• Free software: MIT license

Credits

The ding notification sound is from Corsica_s

The click sound is from kwahmah_02.

The HTML5 part was created with the amazing Vue.js framework.

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.