Fingerprint scanner for Arduino

Howdy,

I watched Adafruit's weekly "Ask An Engineer" show last night and was surprised to see this intriguing new product:

Optical Fingerprint Sensor

http://ladyada.net/products/fingerprint/

Their New Products segment gives a nice demonstration:

In truth, it's just a TTL serial device so it could be used with any microcontroller. However, Adafruit has written a nice Arduino library:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Fingerprint-Sensor-Library

Anyone have a project that fingerprint scanning would be a nice feature for?

I have a Arduino-powered character LCD device in my cube which displays my status, so maybe I could add fingerprint scanner to provide certain individuals with private messages. For example, the current generic status might be 'in design review meeting' but if one of my buddies scans in, it displays 'at the pub on the corner - come join me'.

Cheers,

Drew

Top Replies

ntewinkel over 13 years ago

That is seriously cool. I have no idea for what I would use it, but I want one!
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YT2095 over 13 years ago

might be kinda neat if you could write an algorithm to identify patterns and ethernet board this to AFIS

just a though.
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DAB over 13 years ago

If they are inexpensive, you could easily set one up to restrict access to your computer, house, car, TV, you name it, you could use it for securing anything you have of value.
At 75 USD a clip, you will probably only want to use this for expensive items.
While there are some methods to fool a finger print scan, they are complex and expensive to build, so for most of us, it would be a good device to verify access to any place or thing.
For a business, you can keep track of who is in and who is out, log times of activity, locations visited you name it. You can create your own little 1984 control area.

Just a thought.
DAB

PS: I have seen a similar scan unit for about 17 USD at StarSurplus just this morning, so if you check around it looks like these devices are hitting the market for a reasonable price.
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fustini over 13 years ago

Adafruit posted a pic of a very nice enclosure someone made for the module:

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/04/10/photos-google/
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Nate1616 over 13 years ago

I agree with Nico that it's very cool and I want one but don't know what I would do with it. What are other peoples ideas on what it could be used for?
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Woody over 13 years ago

Would love to conect it up to my RFID gate entry system for back garden instead of the fob.
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