Source: forum.eeeuser.com

The first picture shows the standard swipe-style fingerprintreader that I used. It is the Eikon digital privacy manager which comes with a software package by Upek. I prefer the Upek package over most other fingerprintreader packages I've seen so far because it allows me to assign applications to fingers, login at windows, it has some linux support and it tracks my passwords for websites in both IE and Firefox (though not Firefox 3.0 yet - they're working on that at the moment). The device's outward appearance makes it seem rather bulky, but the actual electronics inside of it are really quite small.

I pried the casing open with a flatheader screwdriver and found the embedded electronics and took them out. The first thing you should notice about the wires is that there are 5 of them instead of the usual 4 for USB, but that's because the fifth one is just grounding. You don't necessarily need to connect it, but you can if you want. The second thing you should notice is that the order of the wires is wrong. The usual order of the colours is red white green black. This one has the d+ and d- of the USB pins reversed, so it now is in the order of red green white black. So I had to make sure I switched the d- and d+ wires when I soldered this device to my Asus eee PC's main PCB.

I wanted the fingerprintreader in the area left of the touchpad, so I took the eee PC apart and found some sort of shielding there. There are no electronics behind this part of the shielding, but there is something there, some kind of foam, which I suspect is there to make the eee PC sound less plasticky and less hollow when tapped on. Makes it seem more solid. Kind of like old telephone handsets had a big piece of metal in it because it made the phone 'feel' like it had 'quality'.

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