How to Scan Fingerprints with Arduino!

welcome back to the channel in today's video I'm going to show you how to use fingerprint scanning with your Arduino projects including what module to use the physical wiring how to add fingerprints to the database and then how to use those fingerprints programmatically to do interesting [Music] things okay so to keep this a quick tutorial on how to use fingerprint scanning in Arduino and not dive too deeply into the various types of tech analogy behind different fingerprint scans just understand that the sensor I'm using in this video is an optical fingerprint sensor it communicates over U protocol which is more commonly known as art as some of my Panic viewers have noted in past videos but um what an optical fingerprint sensor is doing is when you register a fingerprint it basically takes a highresolution photo of your fingerprint pressed up against glass and then when you scan again in the future it's comparing those two photos using like a picture matching algorithm and the higher the level of confidence in it the more likely it is to be a match I'm very impressed with the Simplicity and ease of use of the fingerprint scanner that I have so far it's the optical fingerprint scanner from DF robot this is the second time I've used a DF robot sensor on the channel the first was the voice sensor module a couple videos back they've both been incredibly easy to use super easy to integrate with the Arduino board they both use uart communication and just like the first one the this module has a super thorough really easy to understand uh wiki page and online documentation on the website on how to use it and again one thing that makes this kind of add to a project super easy and streamlined is that there are libraries and example codes that are going to get us really close so whatever your application is it's always a good idea to piggyback off of a library or an existing module that kind of gives you some of the framework for for you let's talk about the specific application that I've built cuz it's pretty cool so the uart fingerprint sensor module comes with the six pin cable to connect it to the back and although there's six wires you actually only need four to make this work the black wire is going to be your ground the red wire is going to be your 5vt power from the Arduino and then the white is going to be your read or data input wire while the green is going to be your transmit or data output wire the yellow wire is called the induction signal output and the blue wires called The Touch induction power input and we're not going to be using those for this basic application okay so the actual wiring of this module is super duper clear I have this red wire jumping from the 5vt power of my Arduino over to the positive power Rail and then the black wire from the ground to the negative power Rail and that's tied to the red and black wires going to my fingerprint sensor that's all I need to power it then I have a green and white wire connected to the green and white wires for transmit and receive Communications and I have those going into pins two and three which when we take a look at the Arduino code you'll see that those are the transmit and receive for a soft serial connection if you've been following along with the Arduino videos on the channel you've seen soft seral before for the Bluetooth module for the voice recognition module so that's not a New Concept to you but if soft serial is a New Concept to you you just need to understand that serial Communications are basically just transmitting and receiving data ones and zeros at an incredibly High rate known as the baod rate you can look into soft cereal versus hard cereal if you want at some point it's super fascinating stuff but we're not going to dive into it too much for this video we're going to try to keep it moving and the only other wiring I've done for this project is I have a green LED and a yellow LED so that when I register two different fingerprints with this sensor I'll be able to turn the green light on if I use let's say my index finger and the yellow light on if I use my thumb so for example if I scan my index finger I want the green light to turn on but then if I scan my thumb I want the yellow light to turn on and obviously you're probably going to want to build an application with a lot more interesting stuff than just flipping between two LEDs but since this isn't a tutorial on how to turn on lights it's a tutorial on how to use fingerprint sensors two LEDs is a great example uh scenario for this video okay and that's really it for the wiring if you have questions feel free to drop them in the comments below let's take a look at the software piece of this project okay so from the Arduino IDE go ahead and plug in your board and uh set up the communications to it I have an Arduino Uno it's showing up on comport 19 which seems high but what do what do I know uh then at the top of the window uh go to sketch and then include library and then manage libraries and in the library manager you should just be able to type in fingerprint and this will be the first one that shows up um it's the Ada fruit fingerprint sensor Library so even though the module is by DF robot they built a sensor that's compatible with the existing Ada fruit sensor uh Library that's straight from their online documentation so just make sure to include that and then actually for registering the fingerprints what we're going to do is we're going to go to the examples tab so still with the library manager open if you hit the little three dots there and then you go to examples there's one called enroll and you want to open that example right up because that is going to give you the framework for enrolling fingerprints with your sensor okay so uh only thing you need to double check and you can get rid of some of the boilerplate code if you want it is useful to read those comments um but I want to make it easier to see on my screen so make sure that for the software serial you have your transmit and receive ports again the green wire um should be on two or the the green wire should come first so if you didn't use pin two and pin three which is what I used just make sure this goes in the order of the green wire uh to the two the sensor and then the white wire to the sensor so for me that's pin two and three I feel like I've talked about that enough um and then the rest of this example is doing everything else for you all the way down to setting B rates and checking like uh initial communication detecting a fingerprint sensor uh in there and then finger dot begins so there's a lot of stuff in here where you don't necessarily need to know what it's doing because it's driver code created by vendors who sell fingerprint modules so the code is pretty well commented and it's pretty easy to understand if you really parse through it there's a lot of built-in functions for checking if it successfully received um or didn't receive an image and you can kind of tell how this technology works by reading this code because basically it's waiting to see a finger taking a picture of of a finger and then if it's able to successfully parse and store that data it'll say fingerprint um okay it'll ask you to scan it a second time if the two fingerprints match it'll say great and it'll ask you for a number to enroll that fingerprint if not it'll say it'll fail um which doesn't really harm anything it just won't store that fingerprint and you have to kind of try it again so I really don't think we have to change anything else let's just go ahead and upload this to our board okay and what you'll see real quick is when you go to the serial monitor you'll get this Adafruit fingerprint fingerprint sensor enrollment and they'll say hey I found the sensor that's great it'll set up some basic parameters we didn't change these this module can hold a thousand fingerprints um and uh and so let's just go down and take a look it says ready to enroll a fingerprint please type in the ID you want to save this finger as let's go ahead and see now let's scan my middle finger cuz I have my thumb and my index and I want to leave those in there already so let's say uh I think I used one and 127 already um let's go ahead and make this uh two I don't know why that was so hard okay I want to make this two and what you'll see once you've typed in the number the module lights up because it's scanning so the green LED on the face of it turns on which is really cool now let's go ahead and scan my middle finger and it says image converted image taken remove finger place the same finger again okay and I printed I I put my finger on there again and it said prints match id2 stored that's great so let's go ahead and do another finger I guess let's say let's do the ring finger and let's make that one three I don't know why I made the one 127 I just was feeling cheeky all right ring finger image taken image converted remove the finger all right place the same finger again let's put it back down and actually that time it couldn't find the features I kind of put the finger uh on the side of the glass kind of on purpose kind of accidentally um but you can see all it does is it resets and it says hey I didn't have confidence in that picture I'm not comfortable uh storing that fingerprint but go ahead and do it again so let's do three and let's try to do the ring finger again and if I fail we might just move on here so okay image taken image converted ID3 place it again let's try get good one there creating model fingerprints did not last match um I've had this problem before with that finger maybe I got like burnt on the finger pad or something let's try it one more time image converted remove finger place the same finger again bang they matched okay there we go so you can see if you have friends if you have family if you're a teacher and you have a whole class or whatever you could go through this exercise and get a scan from every person it'd be a fun way to have your database make sure you track somewhere which fingers do which thing um but fortunately there's another example that will let us see um our scans and what they're stored as okay so we're going to exit out of the serial Monitor and we're also going to exit out of this sketch so if you remember for this sketch we were in the library manager we were looking at fingerprint by Ada fruit we were looking at examples and all of that in Rolling fingers was enroll now we're going to go to fingerprint which all it does is it scans our fingerprint and it's going to tell us by default this is what the built-in program does it's going to tell us what fingerprint just got scanned in this is how we can check and make sure that our module is successfully picking up what it just scanned I'm going to delete out some comments in general you should not delete comments of modules you didn't make it's a good way for you to forget what code is supposed to be doing I'm just doing it so it's a little bit easier to read you can see the same software my serial lines at the top of the program um and so just make sure if you didn't do two and three to leave mes 2 and 3 we're still not doing anything with the LED lights yet we're just focusing on getting the fingerprint scanning working perfectly all right but we're going to just kind of go down and I don't think there's anything else right now that we need to add or change to this code okay so let's go ahead and just upload this to that same board and then we're going to go ahead and open up the the serial Monitor and you'll see it's saying no finger detected at a scan rate of uh 50 millisecond so it's checking 20 times a second now let's go ahead and scan the index finger image taken and it found 127 with a confidence of 108 that's really good it's super confident that uh the finger is accurate now let's do my thumb okay that's number one with a confidence of 108 that's really high actually before I was getting like 60s and stuff now I'm going to do my middle finger which we just registered and that says hey that's number two still really confident now I'll do my ring hey that's number three really confident let me try to do a bad scan like the side of my finger and it doesn't find a match so now let me do a little bit better I'm going to keep kind of rolling my index until it just detects it but maybe with less confidence yeah so there we go like the Flat Pad of my finger um only got a 95 there with the with the fingerprint detection it's a little bit hard to see cuz it's scrolling by um pretty fast since it's doing this 20 times a second but hopefully what you can see so index gives me 127 thumb gives me one middle finger gives me two and then ring finger gives me three so just like that I have four fingers registered and it took a couple of seconds and four wires so this is where using smart sensors gets incredibly cool because you don't have to do a ton of complicated programming most of the time the vendors are providing examples for you and the wiring is relatively simple because there are is a little bit of brains in your sensor so that's kind of cool I think it's kind of cool now let's just take a look at how to use these fingers to do different things with our LEDs okay so specifically I think it'd be cool to have let's say the index turn on the green light the thumb will turn on the yellow light that's kind of the functionality we talked about in the intro and then I'll use my middle finger to turn off both lights and then I'll use the ring finger to turn on both lights I'll probably forget how to do that by the time I get the code pulled up um but let's go ahead and take a look at that okay so and uh this is the first code that is not just an example program um everything else that we did today the enrolling of the fingerprint the checking um don't save the checking of the fingerprint everything else we've done so far has been been just straight examples so I'm not going to leave links to those the one we're about to do with the LED control um is a little bit more unique it's still piggybacking off of the finger example that we were just looking at um but I will leave a link to it cuz I know um there's a chance you guys might want to uh use this specific code as a backbone for your project so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come down under get fingerprint ID which is the function pre-built in running over and over again in the loop to get the fingerprint ID and all I did is I dug into get fingerprint ID a little bit and I saw that it was getting an image if it was good then it was returning um P which was like the code but then it was converting that to a TZ which must be their uh like Checker and if fingerprint is okay they convert the image and then eventually it comes down into this thing finger f. finger ID so basically all you really need to know to use these fingerprints in your custom Arduino code is that finger. finger ID is the thing gets that gets returned when there's a successful scan from the module okay so I come up just under where get fingerprint ID is and I add in some if statements and these could be else if statements um but uh basically what I'm saying first is okay if finger ID is 127 and again I don't know why I made my index finger 127 I just did I'm a goofy little guy all right um so if 127 I'm going to turn the green LED on and I'm going to turn the yellow LED off so that'll be index finger if it's my thumb which is one I'm going to turn green off and then I'm going to turn uh yellow on and now let's add in two more right cuz we just added two more fingers so I'll say if and then two and I'll say say middle finger will turn them both off so low low and then I'll do another else if and I'll say that will turn them both on so hi hi whoops hi Hi how are you good one all right hi high and that's if the finger is three and it's not generally advisable with stuff like this that's doing uh like 20 scans a second to use an else statement like a blanket statement at the end unless you want something something that only lights up while it's actively successfully scanning a finger because if I were to put an else down here anytime I didn't have a finger down at all it would undo whatever I did before so I'm not using an else I'm using a if and a bunch of else ifs okay um but this legitimately is the only code we have to build on top of obviously like setting up uh defining a green LED pin a yellow LED pin and then setting them up as outputs in the setup code which is very basic stuff so if you are that level of beginner with Arduino I have a full Arduino tutorial series on the channel you can check that out but without any further Ado let's just upload this to the board and let's take a look now and see if we can successfully get all of these scanning okay so now we can see when we upload to our board the fingerprint uh scanner starts blinking green it's looking for a finger to scan let's do the index that should be just green let's do the thumb that should be just yellow got a bad scan just yellow let's do the middle finger that should turn them both off and let's do the ring that should turn them both on okay and I think that's pretty sweet I mean I know that uh I geek out over this stuff which probably is the reason I started a YouTube channel on it in the first place but I just think it's so cool how technology that as a kid seemed like science fiction to me I mean I knew fingerprint scanning was a thing but it was like a thing of buy movies in my opinion building stuff like this is just really rewarding and it's been really rewarding as well to see how well um the YouTube community's been responding to a lot of the Arduino videos I've been doing it means a lot of other people find it pretty fun as well okay so that is going to do it for this video a massive thank you to DF robot for sending me the sensor used in this video be sure to check out their website because in addition to this fingerprint sensor and the voice recognition module which I've done videos on they have tons of great products that can be used for a wide variety of projects their website is super easy to use it's super well documented and it has technical examples and typically YouTube links for all of their projects a huge thank you to the patreon supporters as always thank you to everyone who subscribes to the channel leaves nice comments on videos drops likes on the videos and be sure if you have any questions to drop them in the comments below and let me know down there what we should do next on the channel as well thank you so much to everyone for watching as always good luck with your projects and until next time thanks for watching bye