Inspire meeee!!!

[jdbnsn]

Ha Ha Ha! I know the feeling, but at least you're not studying, right?
Jon

[xmastree]

xmastree, i'm thinking about that sensor that you were saying, but it would take a hell of a lot of PIC programming to get it to recognise a particular signal pattern. It might be possible...how many pins does the touchpad have? Looks like a whole Busload there...i really like the idea, but it might be more trouble than i can handle at the moment.

Asuming you mean the conenctor, it's a 20 pin connector, but some are common. 1,11,13,14 and 20 appear to be ground. See it on the right side of the photo.
Along the bottom and the left side )partially covered by the barcode label) are evenly spaced via holes, which presumably connect to the pad itself.
No point picturing the other side, it's just plain black.

PM me your address and it's yours. Even if you don't use it in this project, I can tell you would love to mess with it...

[DaveW]

I've sent xmastree my address, because you can never have too much apparently useless junk electronics.

-Dave

[xmastree]

I've sent xmastree my address, because you can never have too much apparently useless junk electronics.

And I'll send it because I hate throwing away perfectly good stuff, and I have neither the skill, the equipment or the time to figure out how it works.

Here's a start:
http://www.snark.de/mac/tpad/

[DaveW]

Ohh good link! (saves)

-Dave

[Cool1Net6]

Sorry to clutter, as it seems your not using this idea, but I just want to "engineer" Nagoshi's idea a little furthur...

You could find a way to print a fingerprint on some kind of tansparent layer, and by sticking the stuff with leds of the color of your choice, black colored layers and other stuff, you could make some kind of fingerprint display that would light up when you press it. If you got the time to play with a little mechanism, you could make the led(s) move up and down while you press it. The ''switch'' would be activated when you press the ''reader'' by a spring and some kind of button (i suddenly thought about xmastree's 386 case and its new power button, you could get something similar done, but instead of the original 5.25 stick it would be your reader).

This can be done with several narrow beam LED's, a piece of perspex, an interesting background image, and a touch sensor. You place the touch sensor behind the "fingerprint scanner" and when you touch the scanner itself, using a microcontroller you can program it to "scroll" the LED's up and down as if its reading the finger. The trick is to get the LED's to show in rows and have each LED 'row' flicker on and off for a brief time. This simulates a scanning action and avoids moving parts.

But I like the rotating actuator switch with the spinning biohazard type thingie that I dont completely understand idea.

-Cool-