The New Nohmad 2 Time & Attendance Terminal
02 September 2013
Building upon the success of its predecessor, the Nohmad 2 offers several enhancements including superior case material, re-designed motherboard and Fastlane-enablement. Fastlane provides a standardised API and cloud-based device management.
Economic to install and easy to use, the Nohmad 2 provides employers with an instant snapshot of where their workers are at any given moment. The worker either swipes their finger, or places their token - about the size of a pound coin, and just as robust - against the base station.
The Nohmad 2 range of terminals works to provide employers with details of their workers actions at any given moment.
The information confirming the identity of the employee and the date and time of their arrival or departure, is then sent to a designated server where the data is recorded and can be analysed as required.
Traditional attendance terminals operating in real time, generally need to be connected to a physical communications network, often the user's LAN. However the Nohmad 2 does not.
These advantages, along with its modest cost, make it an ideal device for industry sectors supplying low margin services across multiple sites, which also require both accurate and immediate attendance records.
How it works
The Nohmad 2 Terminal brings together a variety of modern technologies. Employee identification is provided either by the use of an iButton™ or a Fingerprint Swipe reader, linked to GPRS wireless networks used by mobile phones worldwide.
GPRS is a data service available to users of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). Unlike a normal phone call, GPRS connections are 'always on' and are charged by the amount of data transferred instead of the length of time the call is made for.
This is ideal for a real-time device like the Nohmad 2, where data has to be sent to the host immediately but occurs at irregular intervals. Each iButton™ or fingerprint credential has a unique and unalterable identity which is used by the Nohmad 2 for identification. A user simply touches their iButton™ or swipes their finger onto the Nohmad 2 and the credential is read instantaneously. Visual and audio indicators provide user feedback.
The Nohmad 2 adds the current date and time to the user's ID and sends this data as a TCP/IP message to a host server, anywhere in the world. The information is usually available for processing within moments.
If the GPRS network is temporarily unavailable, Nohmad 2 stores the data in internal memory and then sends the stored data as soon as a network connection is re-established.
Fastlane Enabled
Enterprise partners providing Time & Attendance (T&A) software typically face two problems when considering new hardware:
Talking to the device - every device has its own way of working, as controlled by the on-board firmware. Software companies have to modify their code to connect with the firmware and take advantage of the features of the device.
Monitoring the device - given that T&A devices are routinely integrated with payroll and/or billing routines, a faulty device can have significant financial impact on the end user. Software companies have to constantly monitor devices and react to faults.
Fastlane offers a fast-track to solving both of these problems:
Standardised API - Fastlane provides a simple route to having a mixed economy of devices. Our software engineers have undertaken the difficult background work, producing a standardised environment that conceals the complexities of how to interface with to each different device types. It provides a generic API mechanism for developers to use. They learn one language and Fastlane automatically translates their commands for each device.
Cloud-based Device Management – As well as providing the common API language, Fastlane also helps to monitor and manage the 'health' of the estate of remote devices by keeping track of which devices are online, gathering diagnostic information about devices and supporting remedial features such as reboots and firmware upgrades. Software developers can control the standard settings that should be applied across their fleet of time and attendance devices, and to co-ordinate the hardware estate of their customers.
Currently, Fastlane is available only for our range of Nohmad 2 terminals.