Snow Stuff For Hire (SSFH) - a POS-like system designed for very quick rental operations at small ski resorts

SSFH is a Point of Sale (POS)-like GUI program written in C++/Qt to handle rental operations at Hedeland Skicenter, which is the largest ski resort in Denmark, run on a voluntarily basis by Roskilde Skiklub.

Although the largest ski resort in Denmark, it is still very small by international standards, and are only visited on a single-day basis. As such, customers in the ski rental needs quick handling of rental operations, so they can go skiing for as much of the day as possibly. The system is designed to offer this, by using the universially held "sundhedskort" as identification for the rental operations, and reading the information using a standard magnetic card reader.

The actual item handling is based on barcode marking of all items, and using a standard barcode reader to scan the barcodes. The system supports writing receipts to a standard thermal printer.

Aside from the rental operations, the system supports some basic item handling, such as creating and deleting items, and it supports making a status of the items in your store.

The system is designed to be cheap to implement, using cheap hardware, and obviously, free software.

SSFH is written in C++/Qt, and as such, it should be portable to all platforms that is supported by Qt.

The hardware interactions have only been tested under Linux, though. The magnetic card reader and barcode scanner is assumed to generate keyboard events, which in principle should work unchanged on any platform, but the interaction with the thermal printer requires opening the relevant USB port, and writing commands directly to it. Opening the port will require some changes to work on another platform.

Qt version 5, inclusive linguist.

On *ubuntu, you need at least these packages:

qt5-default qqt5-qmake tbase5-dev-tools qttools5-dev-tools

which should bring in an development enviroment for qt5. Obviously, you need the gcc tools as well.

(For audio feedback, currently mplayer - this will be changed to Qt's multimedia platform later).

You also need a magnetic card reader, a barcode scanner, and a thermal printer. You can test the system without, but for actual use you will want at least a barcode scanner.

The system has been in use for the last three seasons and does not contain any known serious bugs.

Some values are hardcoded to support the processes at Hedeland Skicenter, and is currently not configurable.

The system does not support the calculating of prices.

SSFH is licensed under GPL v3 or later. This is not currently marked in any parts of the code.

SSFH uses the Qt tool qmake to build and compile. Run qmake, then make, to build it.

SSFH is built using qtcreator project. If you have qtcreator installed, you should be able to build it and run tests from within qtcreator. You may need to setup a debug configuration, an example (the one I use) is part of this source tree.

If you do not have qtcreator, you can use the supplied file Makefile.noqtcreator to run the main build:

make -f Makefile.noqtcreator

This will take care of building stuff, running the unittests and compiling the language files.

In order to use SSFH, you need to setup a database that reflects some basic information about your setup.

If you just want to check the program out, here are the steps to get you started:

git clone https://github.com/madsdyd/ssfh.git
cd ssfh
make -f Makefile.noqtcreator 
cd src
./SnowStuffForHire.bin ../schema/test.db /tmp/ssfh.log

This should run the program, in Danish, if your locale matches Danish, or in English otherwise.

In order for SSFH to work, it needs a database.

SSFH uses sqlite as its database of choice, but needs a database file as an argument.

When you start out, you can use one of the databases from schema directory: Either "test.db" which contains some sample data, or "empty.db" which has no items, but does contain some (danish) itemtypes.

The database (model) is versioned in the "configuration" table, key db_version, and the database should match the version compiled into the binary. In the schema directory there are some scripts to control versioning of the database.