Arduino and USB fingerprint scanners.

Projects General Guidance
1

Could anyone help me hack an usb fingerprint scanner or reader, i want to interface it to an arduino. I presume it'll be just like hacking an optical mouse. usb fingerprint scanners or readers are very cheap when compared to nitgen fingerprint modules, i can save a lot of money by hacking them. I would like to hear your opinion on this.

Thank you
Teja

2

I would like to hear your opinion on this.

I bet you won't.

This will not work for two reasons.

  1. The arduino is not a USB host and so connecting any USB client device is tricky to impossible.
  2. Finger print scanners generate a lot of data, much more that the arduino can store in its RAM. Therefore you have to make off chip storage of some sort.
3

Having worked with fingerpint scanners I can only agree with Mike. A fingerprint in compressed form (features) takes minimal 500 bytes (probably 5000) . To analyse a fingerprint one has to make a scan and process the whole bitmap of minimal 100x200 bytes (grayscale 1 byte per pixel) = 20K , that is far more than one Arduino can handle, and that is the absolute minimal scenario. So my advice is buy a fingerprint module with built in recognition and "database". These have (serial) IO lines which can work very well with an Arduino.

Search the forum and you will find discussions like - http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1272027807 -

Tell us more about your project, what do you want to accomplish? may be interesting.