BUILDING A FINGERPRINT SCANNER

So i had a project defense last week and i decided to take a few pictures.I'm a student in my 3rd year studying Mechatronics Engineering and we did two Electrical Engineering projects. The first one was a Fingerprint scanner and the second was a 1KVA Automatic Voltage Regulator Stabilizer.

Splitted into groups, mine was the last and each individual was to face a panel of 5 instructors. It really was a bit intense. Not because of the occasion but it was mainly because we didn't really have an adequate knowledge of the project. The project was done perfectly well and it was so attractive that the instructors were really impressed and wanted to know how we did it. And that was the problem. We didn't do it ourselves. The truth was, we had paid a technician to help us design and complete the project...

Surprised? No, don't be. It isn't like we wouldn't have loved to execute the project ourselves but in a system where you have not been taught how to do something and you're expected to submit an excellent work, you should expect this. Besides, there was not enough time for us as a group to come up with the blueprint for the project. And also we So we had to give it to a mercenary.

That's the reality of things around here. Most students who embark on projects and stuffs like that most times don't have sufficient knowledge on what they want to do but are forced to do so anyway... And i think this spans to lecturers of higher institutions. Many have ghostwriters who help them in researching topics and writing them.

Here's a little background knowledge to the Fingerprint scanner project
Biometrics refers to the automatic identification of a person based on his physiological/behavioral characteristics. This method of identification is preferred for various reasons; the person to be identified is required to be physically present at the point of identification. Identification based on biometric techniques obviates the need to remember a password or carry a token. With the increased use of computers or vehicles of information technology, it is necessary to restrict access to sensitive or personal data.

Perhaps most of the work in biometric identification has gone into the fingerprint. For general security and computer access control application fingerprints are gaining popularity. The fingerprint’s stability and uniqueness are well established. Based upon a century of examination, it is estimated that the change of two people, including twins, having the same print is less than one a billion. In verifying a print, many devices on the market analyze the position of details called minutiae such as the endpoints and junctions of print ridges. These devices assign locations to the minutiae using x, y, and directional variables. Some devices also count the number of ridges between minutiae to form the reference template.

FACT AND FINDINGS OF ATTENDANCE SYSTEM

Staff or student attendance software system is a software used to manage or monitor the time worked by employees for the purpose of efficiency and punctuality of the employees. These systems may be integrated with existing payroll processing software. Also, these systems track employee that come late to work and the ones that come early. These systems usually are able to give reports of all the staff records concerning signing in and out. The advantages of student attendance monitoring system are: it can reduce the time needed to enter attendance data into school system and can reduce errors in enforcement of company attendance policies.
Student Attendance Monitoring System is an easy way to keep track of any organization's attendance records. It also works very well as a member database. The program was developed with three main goals in mind: versatility, ease of use, and security

COMPONENTS

The Uno Board
The Uno is a MCU board based on the ATmega328P. It has been provided with 14 digital I/O pins (of these 6 can be employed as PWM O/Ps), 6 analog I/Ps, a USB connection, a 16 MegaHz quartz crystal, an ICSP header, a power jack and a reset button. It has everything required to 10 support the micro controller; we just got to connect it to a computer or any such processing device with the provided USB cable or it can be powered using a 5V- 12V ACto-DC adapter or appropriate battery to begin operation. We can experiment with our Uno without thinking about doing something wrong, at worst we may damage the MCU. This can be easily rectified by replacing the chip cheaply and just as easily starting over again.

Atmega328P Processor
The ATmega328P is low power Complementary MoS 8bit microcontroller, the architecture of this is based up on the AVR enhancement Reduced instruction set computer architecture. It will execute the instruction in a single clock cycle even the instruction s powerful. Atmega328P can achieves high throughputs approximately 1 MIPS per MHz, so the designer have the full flexibility to design and optimize between power consumption and processing speed.

Liquid Crystal Display
It is very important to keep a track of the working of almost all the automated and semiautomated devices, be it a washing machine, an autonomous robot or anything else. This is achieved by displaying their status on a small display module. LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen is such a display module and a 16x2 LCD module is very commonly used. These modules are replacing seven segments and other multi segment LEDs for these purposes. The reasons being: LCDs are economical, easily programmable, have no limitation of displaying special & even custom characters (unlike in seven segments), animations and so on. LCD interfaced with a microcontroller to display a message or status of a device.

*** FPM10A FingerPrint Sensor***
The FPM10A Optical Fingerprint Sensor makes fingerprint detection and verification a piece of cake. The module has a next-generation DSP chip does does complex DSP tasks such as image rendering, pattern recognition, image compression and lots of other tasks in a fraction of a second.
The module has internal flash memory where you can store upto 300 fingerprints. The RED LED in the lens lights up during fingerprint detection, so you know it is working.
Features:
• Supply voltage: DC 3.6 ~ 6.0V / 3.3V
• Supply Current: Current: <120mA
• Peak current: <140mA
• Fingerprint image time: <1.0 seconds
• Window size: 14 x 18 mm
• Matching mode: Match mode (1:1)
• Search mode (1: N)
• Signature File: 256 bytes
• Template files: 512 bytes
• Storage capacity: 300
• Safety level: five (from low to high: 1,2,3,4,5)
• False Accept Rate (FAR): <0.001% (security level 3)

SD Card Module
The micro- SD Card Module is a simple solution for transferring data to and from a standard SD card. The pin out is directly compatible with Arduino, but can also be used with other microcontrollers. It allows you to add mass storage and data logging to your project.
This module has SPI interface which is compatible with any SD card and it use 5V or 3.3V power supply which is compatible with Arduino UNO/Mega.

Lithium Polymer Battery
The device is powered using Lithium Polymer battery. The battery is 3.7v and therefore converted to 5v using a DC-DC voltage boost, since 5v is needed to run the microcontroller. The capacity of the battery is 7500mAh. The device is charged using a 5v power supply.

4 X 4 Matrix Keypad
A matrix keypad is a small compact input device that accepts user inputs and processed by Microcontrollers. You might have seen this in most commonly used devices like Calculators, Digital locks, Gas pumps and DIY projects. It comes in different types, one of them is membrane keypads, it is thinner in size and you can paste it on top of your creative projects.
If we have to connect 16 buttons to the microcontroller, then each button takes 1 GPIO pin. But if we use the matrix keypad we just need 8 pins only.

The main aim of this project is to take the attendance and display when requested.Finger print identification is based on the fact that no two persons will have the same finger print in this world. This is because of the peculiar genetic code of DNA in each person. Finger print module differentiates between two fingers based on the ridges and valleys on finger print. When the finger print is given it stores the points where there are changes in the direction of ridges and valleys using some algorithms. Inside the finger print module a DSP processor is present to implement and analyze the algorithm.
Main heart of the circuit is finger print module. This sends commands to the controller when ever finger print is matched. Microcontroller receives these commands from the finger print module and uses the internal EEPROM to store the attendance. Keypad is used to send the requests to the controller either enroll the new one or to save the attendance or to exit.LCD display displays the messages related to the commands received