Any advice is much appreciated!! We are attempting to create a security station using a raspberry pi. We are fairly new to Raspberry Pi. Thank you in advance for your time and effort!
Overall goal:
Use Raspberry Pi 3 and two USB devices (finger print scanner and barcode scanner) to verify a person’s identity.
Raspberry pi platform: raspbian
Issue 1: Store Barcodes (we have the barcode scanner reporting values to the Raspberry Pi’s notepad)
Issue 2: Store fingerprints (We can see them on a desktop computer but not on the Pi)
Issue 3: If the barcode and fingerprint match, send a signal out on a GPIO (good match)
Issue 4: If the barcode and fingerprint do not match, send a separate signal out on a different GPIO (poor match)
Issue 5: If the barcode or fingerprint do not match a stored value, send a separate signal out on a different GPIO (not found)
Integration of multiple components is always a bit of trouble in the beginning of a new project. It would most likely be best to setup each of the device independently first and ensure they work well with the RPi.
Concerning the bar code scanner, it seems it is set to work as a USB Keyboard by default (manual, page 9). You will most likely want it to work as a serial port instead, which you can then read from. Check chapter 4 (communication settings) in the manual (pages 9-13) for more details on this.
The product does come with an detailed manual and example code in C++ (Windows target). You can find those on the product page under Useful Links. That being said, an example for the RPi would be more helpful and you can find some of those here (link to GitHub here) and here.
As for integrating the two together, once you have each working well on the RPi individually, you will need to create some new code to check both sensors together. We recommend to go with Python since the example above is in Python and it allows for simple and quick development cycles when trying out new stuff.
Do not forget you will need to program the finger scanner with the fingers to be read, first. This can be done either with the demo software or with your own implementation.
