CatLab Drinks

Simple open source cash register system for events / quizzes / parties. Source code available at GitHub.

What is CatLab Drinks?

Goal

CatLab Drinks aims to be an open source cash register system for small events. The project tries to provide a solution for:

Avoid calculation errors with vouchers / payments / order totals
Keep track of all sales & locations
Allow attendeeds to place orders from their own smartphone
Optionally, allow the user of NFC topup cards (NFC NTAG 213 tags)
All systems should stay opperational even in offline scenarios

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Open CatLab Drinks

Screenshots

Background

CatLab Drinks is developed for use during the quiz events of De Quizfabriek. At these quizzes all attending teams must bring a tablet or smartphone to answer the quiz questions. Using CatLab Drinks we have given the attendees the ability to send drink orders straight to the bar. By giving each quiz team their own NFC topup card, and linking that card to the team in our internal system, these orders are paid immediately and no money has to change hands. If a team prefers to order drinks at the bar, he can still use the NFC topup card to pay for his drinks at the bar.

Setup

Create an account

After you've created an account you arrive at the events overview. Each event has its own price list (menu) which you can change by clicking the menu icon. When you're done with setting the correct prices for each item, you can op the Bar HQ by clicking on the event name. This screen should be used at the bars. At this screen you can open or close remote orders by clicking the status button. (It might be handy to close down remote orders during very busy times.)

Digital NFC topup cards

CatLab drinks implements a closed loop RFIC/NFC payment system.

To use the NFC topup cards you will need an acr122u card reader for each bar or cash register (other readers might work too, but have not been tested) and for each team / attendee you'll need an NTAG213 NFC chip. Communication between the card reader and the browser happens over a socket.io connection, so you will need to install a separate service for that to work. We use a Raspberry Pi, but you can also run the service on a laptop.