Devices

The Alpaka Presence app is free in both app stores, so you can create as many devices as you like and place them around your workplace, letting staff come and go through multiple entrances and exits.

Creating a new device for a head office, for example, you can choose any colour - it doesn't matter. For the buttons, you can remove the enter and exit buttons and use only facial recognition, which means no keypad is needed, and the photo setting turns to none, since the photo is the facial recognition itself. The "always" and "random" photo options are for when you're using PIN codes or QR codes - with a keypad switched on you can randomly take a photo as someone clocks in, to keep people honest about not sharing PINs or QR codes with each other, or always take a photo if you think that's still happening. The best approach is to skip PINs and QR codes altogether and just use facial recognition with the photo option off.

You can change how long the countdown takes before a reading is taken - setting it to one second, for example, stops people queuing at the device waiting to arrive all at once.

The lock password on the device is not the same as your secure Alpaka login password, which is encrypted and can't be recovered. This password just stops staff changing the device's configuration. On an Android device, a text input tends to capitalise the first letter automatically, so a password like "password" might end up being entered as "Password" by mistake if someone's trying to unlock the device - using a numeric password like 1234 avoids that problem.

Alpaka Presence continues to store new readings even when the device is offline - if it loses wifi or your building loses internet, readings stay in its internal memory and are sent to Alpaka once connectivity returns. If a device is offline too long, you can set a no-reading trigger - for example 12 hours - which uses Alpaka's workflow feature to email someone, letting them know a device hasn't sent a reading in that time so they can go and check why.

Existing devices you no longer need can be made inactive, meaning readings are no longer accepted and are discarded. Once a device is created, you're given a QR code to configure it, or a manual config code to enter directly. On the device itself, the lock icon in the top right lets you unlock it with the password you set, and you can refresh the configuration if you've made changes in the web browser that you want the device to pick up immediately - otherwise it checks for changes roughly every hour on its own.

Most Alpaka Presence readings are a place and a person - two identities, one of them always human. There's a scenario where installing hardware doesn't make sense: a location visited infrequently by very few people, where it's not worth having a phone permanently plugged in and connected. In that case, you can configure a device for a person instead of a site or department - assigning it to an individual's own phone, with enter, exit and a keypad rather than facial recognition.

When that person's device is the person rather than the place, they need a way to announce which place they've arrived at. Sites can have their own PIN and QR code too, the same way staff do, so someone using their own phone as their device can type in a site's PIN or scan its QR code to log their arrival there. Alpaka checks the phone's geolocation to confirm it's genuinely at the place being claimed.

The typical setup is a single device fixed in one place, used by staff who bring nothing but their faces. But for loan workers or remote workers, using their own phone as the device, and scanning into whichever site they've arrived at, is the alternative. There's no single right answer - configure devices the way that works best for your organisation.