Picked up one of those common UART fingerprint modules? I did too. Turns out, it’s not just a scanner—it does internal matching with an onboard STM32 chip. I tested it with an ESP32 board, wrote up a simple Arduino sketch, and it works surprisingly well. Full pinout, usage, and code included!
Back to FPC1020 driver work! I fired up an ESP8266 with Arduino to detect finger presence using the scanner’s built-in sensor matrix. It’s simple, fast, and could help optimize image capture—or even act like a button or gesture detector. Full example code and visuals inside!
Getting actual fingerprint data out of the FPC1020A scanner was way harder than I expected. After days of digging and reverse-engineering Android kernel drivers, I finally got it to scan! Now I can detect fingers and capture raw images—next stop: matching algorithms.
Finally got my hands on the FPC1020 fingerprint scanners! These things are tiny, SPI-based, and perfect for a built-in solution. I built test boards, hooked them up to a NodeMCU, and wrote a basic Arduino sketch to read the hardware ID. Next step: integrating with the main authenticator project!
Using a button for FIDO2 user verification felt… a bit too easy to spoof. So I grabbed two fingerprint modules—GROW R300 and FPC1020—to try adding real biometric authentication. R300 might even let me skip its built-in MCU and handle image processing myself. Let’s see where this goes!