Thinkpads Forum

I'm not sure if this has been addressed or not, but a search through the archives didn't reveal anything similar to it.

Anyways, I was wondering if there is any way to get the Sony Fingerprint Reader software working on Thinkpads. For my friend's Sony VAIO, he doesn't have to do the CTRL + F2 hot key and then swipe his finger. He can just swipe his finger and it is automatically recognized. I think this would be a lot more convenient and better utilization of the fingerprint reader. Besides, we can't let Sony be more innovative than us .

So if anyone has a way to achieve this, please do share.

I really don't know of a way to automate it; it is a trigger+swipe system as far as I can tell. Either wait until something launches the process to prompt you to swipe.

The "innovation" concept of those Sony FPRs quickly goes away when you realize that any swipe will trigger it and has the ability to bring some things to a screeching halt. If you in a game or doing fullscreen renders, it just takes a brush of the finger, pam, wrist, or pretty much any other skin surface over it to trigger the dialog.

It would be good if there was a way to toggle such behaviour in the software; another possibility is if somebody could use AutoIt or the like to do so, but that would be under the assumption that the hardware for the fingerprint reader has the ability to pick up any scan whilst the prompt-to-swipe is not active (which I suspect it doesn't).

HTH

christopher_wolf wrote: The "innovation" concept of those Sony FPRs quickly goes away when you realize that any swipe will trigger it and has the ability to bring some things to a screeching halt. If you in a game or doing fullscreen renders, it just takes a brush of the finger, pam, wrist, or pretty much any other skin surface over it to trigger the dialog.

It would be good if there was a way to toggle such behaviour in the software; another possibility is if somebody could use AutoIt or the like to do so, but that would be under the assumption that the hardware for the fingerprint reader has the ability to pick up any scan whilst the prompt-to-swipe is not active (which I suspect it doesn't).

I think the fingerprint reader gets powered down in order to save battery power, so it wouldn't be able to detect the finger. (I think I read this somewhere in the lenovo documentation, but I can't find it now). I guess if you didn't care about the slightly reduced battery life, or were running on the AC adapter, you could change that behaviour if you knew the API for the fingerprint reader....

Lev

Yes, *exactly*.

Although guess how much their SDK for that costs?

There is, however, always the BioAPI source that one could use to glean ideas off of. Yet that requires a whole program or process to constantly monitor the FPR seperate from CSS and the embedded driver for it.

Oh and, sadly, the BioAPI.org site is also down; so all the references they make in the UPEK documentation to it become near useless.