Interfacing a Fingerprint Sensor with Home Assistant

Metal keys have been used for literally thousands of years to keep things secure, but create one more thing to remember when you step outside of your house. More recently however, biometrics which identify people by their unique characteristics, has been developed to allow you to become the actual key. While still not yet widely employed, if you want to add biometrics — namely a fingerprint reader — to your home automation system, Lewis Barclay of Everything Smart Home shows us how to get started.

Barclay’s experimentation with these devices started about five years ago, when he obtained fingerprint sensors, and was able to get them to work. Unfortunately, adding and deleting fingerprints was difficult without reprogramming, so he set them aside. Now, however, with the Wemos D1 mini ESP8266 board and Home Assistant communicating over MQTT, he’s been able to automate the process of fingerprint management. Changes can be done with a few clicks on the ol’ smartphone, along with holding your finger (or thumb) up to the scanner’s window as needed.

The next step of course would be to enable the fingerprint to unlock something or otherwise trigger an action, or you could even store fingerprint info to a central database. Perhaps there is more to come in the future. For a bit more basics on fingerprint scanning, Barclay has a guide to using it with and Arduino on this page up right now, and the first article has quite a few other links to help you get your smart home running!