Fingerprint Garage Door Won’t Open Every Time A Neighbor Microwaves A Burrito

With three kids, including himself, [Dave] faced the very real likelihood of someone absent-mindedly leaving the garage door open and being robbed blind. Rather than installing some plebeian solution, he compiled a feature list. And what a feature list it is!

The garage door needed to notify him of its status with strategically placed LEDs around the house, and give him full control on his devices. He wanted to open and close it using his existing key-code entry system. Lastly, it would be extra-cool if he could add some biometrics to it; in this case, a fingerprint sensor.

The core hardware is the staple Arduino augmented with a fingerprint module, a touch screen, some vitamins, and a WiFi break-out. He also worked up some casings in tinkercad: one for the indoor hardware, another with a flip cover for the outdoor fingerprint scanner.

We think [Dave] has accomplished what he set out to. We can just picture the would-be-thief staring at the finger print scanner and moving their operation one house over where the world is simpler. Video after the break.

18 thoughts on “Fingerprint Garage Door Won’t Open Every Time A Neighbor Microwaves A Burrito

  1. Should probably also secure the emergency release on the garage door. There’s a widely-publicized method for quickly disengaging the door motor and opening the door. Search ‘six second garage door’ for examples.

  2. Many many moons ago, early RF garage door openers would open due to random RF. Ones with rolling keys were not even thought of yet.

    The condo neighborhood I lived in in the 80’s was all built in a single spasm of a developer. They, of course, used all the same Stanley garage door openers, which were keyed using a set of DIP switches in the opener and in the remote. The guys installing them set the entire neighborhood sequentially. An 8 bit counter, transistor, and pulse generator set to 1 every 5 seconds would mane the entire development’s garage doors go up in sequential order, and then back down…Kinda like a garage door wave. :)

    Hypothetically, of course. ;)

    1. This was done as a gag in a few movies around that time. Someone would have an RF device (to a bomb, rocket, robot, whatever) running around town and as they activated the thing, doors all up and down the street would open or close.

      The sad part, some of that was truly too early to adopt. IIRC, Atari developed a console with RF controllers. Story goes they couldn’t get FCC approval because the controllers would open and close doors during testing. Another factor was that the channels were fixed to player 1 and 2 and another console next door would receive the input from the rogue controller. Rather than develop a desig that didn’t mess with remote doors or other consoles Atari just scrapped the idea.

  3. Pro’s:
    + You can check your door status online
    + You can open it with a fingerprint

    Cons:
    – Someone may check your door status online
    – Someone may open it with a stolen fingerprint (or basically tricking the reader)

    Not worth it imo (nice project, but i wouldn’t install this on mine)

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