Storage Boxx PHP Inventory System (With QR & NFC Scanner)

Storage Boxx is an open-source PHP Inventory Management System. With a built-in webcam QR scanner, NFC scanner, passwordless login, and an optional experimental AI assistant.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

LICENSE & DOWNLOAD

GitHub | SourceForge

Storage Boxx is released under the MIT License. You are free to use it for personal and commercial projects, and modify it as you see fit. On the condition that the software is provided “as-is”. There are no warranties provided and “no strings attached”. Code Boxx and the authors are not liable for any claims, damages, or liabilities.

 

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SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• LAMP/WAMP/MAMP/XAMPP
• Apache Mod Rewrite
• PHP MYSQL PDO Extension
• PHP OpenSSL Extension
• At least PHP 8.0

 

 

INSTALLATION

Just copy/unzip into your HTTP folder. Access http://your-site.com in the browser and walk through the installer.

 

 

EQUIPMENT RECOMMENDATIONS

• Webcam – If you are using a desktop without a webcam, a simple one only costs about $20~30.
• USB QR Code scanner – Alternatively, a “dedicated barcode scanner” will cost about $30~40 bucks.
• NFC tags – 10 pieces of Ntag213 only cost 2-3 bucks. Buy them in bulk, and one piece will only cost a few cents.
• Fingerprint sensors – These are kind of expensive… But I got lucky with a $25 “Made in China” that works just fine.
• Label printer – Print your QR codes. There are Bluetooth ones that can pair with smartphones.

 

PART 1) REGISTER ITEMS

First step, register all your items. You can do it one by one, or the smarter way is to upload a CSV file if you have a lot of products.

 

PART 2) REGISTER BATCHES

Now that the items are in place, create the batches for every item.

• Batches are particularly good for managing items with expiry dates, or if you want to track how slow/fast a batch moves.
• For the people who don’t care about “batches” – Just create a dummy batch and use it for a lifetime.
• Print the QR code for the batches, and/or create the NFC tags.

 

 

PART 3) ITEM MOVEMENT

Record the item/batch movement accordingly over time. Pretty self-explanatory.

• Set the direction (in, out, discard, stock take).
• Set the quantity.
• Add notes, if any.
• Enter the SKU and batch – Or just scan.

 

PART 4) CHECK

You can access the “check” section at any time, check the stock movement history.

 

EXTRA) PASSWORDLESS SIGN IN

The days of stinky passwords are over.

• You can create NFC login tags (staff card) for users. So long as they have a compatible device/browser, they can use it to login without entering the user/password.
• Alternatively, open the user menu after you have signed in (top-right corner) – Passwordless Login. Register to sign in with your fingerprint, face recognition, or pin number.

 

 

 

I DELETED ALL ADMIN ACCOUNTS

require "lib/CORE-Go.php";
$_CORE->load("Users");
$_CORE->Users->save("NAME", "EMAIL", "PASSWORD", "A");

Just create an “account recovery” script to create a new account. Run and delete this afterward.

 

CHANGED DOMAIN OR PATH

• Update SITE_NAME and HOST_BASE in lib/CORE-Config.php. Include the path (with a trailing slash) if not deployed at the base URL. E.G. http://site.com/storageboxx/
• Delete the existing .htaccess file.
• Create init.php.
  • require "lib/CORE-Go.php";
  • $_CORE->Route->init();
• Access http://site.com/init.php, this will automatically regenerate .htaccess and update CB-manifest.json.
• Delete init.php.
• Clear the service worker, flush the browser cache, and do a hard reload if you want to be “totally safe”.

 

PAGES ARE NOT RESOLVING OR SHOWING PROPERLY

• Make sure that MOD_REWRITE is enabled in Apache.
• Make sure that AllowOverride is set properly in Apache.
• If using https://, make sure that your SSL cert and virtual host are properly set.
• In Mac/Linux, make sure that Apache/PHP has permission to read the files and folders.

Here is a quick “working example” of a test site on my WAMP server:

<VirtualHost site.com:443>
  DocumentRoot "D:\http"
  ServerName site.com:443
  SSLEngine On
  SSLCertificateFile "C:/xampp/apache/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt"
  SSLCertificateKeyFile "C:/xampp/apache/conf/ssl.key/server.key"
  <Directory "D:\http">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

 

 

NOT WORKING. DON’T KNOW WHY.

Open the developer’s console, reload the page, and see the error message.

• How To Debug Javascript – Very Simple Guide
• How To Debug PHP – Very Simple Guide

 

NFC FEATURES ARE “NOT WORKING”!

At the time of writing, Web NFC only works on Android Chrome and Baidu Browser – CanIUse

 

UNABLE TO GENERATE JSON WEB TOKEN KEYS

Make sure that the OpenSSL extension is properly installed.

• Linux
  • It is as simple as sudo apt-get install openssl.
  • Or yum install openssl for the CentOS users.
  • Then, php -i | grep -i openssl.
• Windows – I am using XAMPP and OpenSSL is already included. But a hiccup got me stumped for a while.
  • Start > Search for “system environment” > “Edit the system environment variables” > “Environment variables”.
  • Add a new system variable called OPENSSL_CONF and point it to the openssl.cnf file. By default, it is located at xampp\php\extras\openssl\openssl.cnf.

 

 

 

BUILT ON CORE BOXX

• At least go through the very short tutorial.
• Thereafter, go into the deeper concepts:
  • Core Engine
  • Database
  • Routes
  • JWT Sessions
• Storage Boxx has also adopted the following modules:
  • Users
  • NFC Login
  • Passwordless Login
  • Admin Panel
  • Web Push

 

SUPPORTING MULTIPLE HOST/DOMAIN NAMES

• In CORE-Config.php, detect the origin and set HOST_BASE accordingly.
• If you have different paths, you are going to face problems with the manifest. E.G. https://sitea.com and https://siteb.com/storageboxx.
  • You can create multiple CB-manifest.json, each with a different start_url and scope. In TEMPLATE-top.php, point to the “correct manifest” accordingly.
  • Alternatively, generate the manifest dynamically using PHP.

 

SETTING TIMEZONES

• You can change the default timezone in CORE-Config.php, SYS_TZ and SYS_TZ_OFFSET. Beware though, this can mess up the timestamps in the database if you already have entries.
• If you have to support multiple timezones, it will be wise to keep the system default to UTC. Calculate the offset in PHP or MYSQL queries instead.

 

 

I WANT TO CHANGE THE DATE FORMAT

• Login > System Settings > There are 4 “MYSQL date/time format” settings, change them accordingly. These are simply formats for the MYSQL DATE_FORMAT() function.
• Use the respective date/time format in your SQL – "SELECT DATE_FORMAT(`col`, '".DT_LONG."') FROM `table`".

 

EXPIRING ITEMS NOTIFICATION

Tricky.

• Create a expire-notify.php script, set it to run every 24 hours in Windows Task Scheduler or CRON.
• Add a EXPIRE_WARN_DAYS setting.
• Modify $_CORE->Report->getExpiry() to get expiring items with EXPIRE DAYS > 0 && EXPIRE DAYS <= EXPIRE_WARN_DAYS.
• If there are expiring items, send the notification.
• It will be wise to add another EXPIRE_NOTIFIED table to keep the item_id and batch_name… Or the system will nag every 24 hours until the item expires.

 

 

 

REQUIREMENTS

• Python – Yes, Python. Not PHP. Version 3.9 to 3.10 seems to work fine at the time of writing.
• Microsoft C++ Build Tools
• Plenty of “processing juice”. AI does consume quite a lot of system resources, depending on the model size.

 

INSTALLATION

• Move the ai folder out of your HTTP folder. Yes, keep it outside of your project folder.
• Access the GPT4All website, and scroll down to the “Model Explorer”. Pick your poison, download your chosen model into ai/models.
• Alternatively, here is the list of available models in JSON.
• Edit settings.json, change the model to your own.
• Run 1-install.bat (Windows) 1-install.sh (Linux/Mac). This will automatically:
  • Create a virtual environment and activate it.
  • Download the necessary modules.

 

CREATE A “CONTEXT DATABASE”

• Put the documents that you want the AI to “learn” in ai/docs – This can be CSV, TXT, PDF, HTML, MD, or DOCX.
• Run 2-create.bat (Windows) 2-create.sh (Linux/Mac).
• This will read all the documents in ai/docs and create a database ai.db.
• Try not to overwhelm by putting in too many documents… There’s a limit to how much things can be processed.

 

LAUNCH

• Finally, just run 3-launch.bat (Windows) 3-launch.sh (Linux/Mac).
• This will deploy the bot at ws://localhost:5678.
• Change settings.json and assets/PAGE-ai.js if you want to deploy it at a different port.

 

NOTES ON THE PERFORMANCE

• GPT4ALL does not support GPU acceleration at the time of writing. It’s slow, but at least it works across multiple different platforms.
• If you want a free GPU-accelerated model, check out LLAMA.
• This module is based on LangChain – It also supports many other models, ChatGPT included. Do your own tweaks to create.py and bot.py if you want to use other models than GPT4All.
• On my potato server, the Falcon model seems to understand text content well enough… But generates erroneous results when it comes to numbers.
• The results pretty much depend on the model and prompt.txt template – Tweak and do your own experiments. It’s an EXPERIMENTAL module after all.
• You can also directly chain the AI to an SQL database. Maybe in a future update when I have dug deeper into LangChain.
• You may want to find some way to verify the user. Not a good idea to open the AI assistant to the entire world.
• Also, limit the total number of users at once if you have limited system resources.