Just added a section to the top of
http://reactivated.net/fprint/wiki/Unsupported_devices
The situation right now is a bit regrettable, due to lack of people
involved on the development side, and challenges introduced by the
current generation of fingerprint scanning devices. Personally, I'm not
finding time, and also I've got 2 unsupported devices here which are
giving me headaches, I've spent hours on each one and am not making
progress. :(
There do not appear to be any active driver development efforts
happening at the moment.
Plenty of users have published USB sniff logs on the mailing list for
many of the devices below, the next step is for someone to step up,
examine these logs and write driver code. This is a very difficult task
if said developer does not have a good level of knowledge of USB and the
workings of similar devices, and is impractically time consuming if the
developer does not have access to the hardware.
The difficulties here include:
* The current generation of devices usually include encryption, of
either the procotol, the image data, or both
* Even where the image data is unencrypted, the data comes directly
from the sensor, so complex reconstruction algorithms are needed to
convert it to image form
Another approach is to use chinese-wall reverse engineering, where 1
party disassembles and documents the windows driver for such hardware,
and another party writes a libfprint driver. This is also very time
consuming and requires a very skilled and patient person to do the
disassembly/documentation.
In short: what we need right now is skilled developers who have done
this kind of driver-development before, who have access to the hardware,
and a lot of time on their hands. You're unlikely to spur progress by
posting further sniff logs to the mailing list.
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