Wow… he has reached the pinnacle of lazy. He needs some sort of award, the amazing effort he put into being lazy is incredible. I too hate moving my hand a few inches to scroll. But seriously, great idea ^-^

Posted at 1:50 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by Ross Peters

i never use the mouse except for nmap outher wise im in the cmd

Posted at 2:01 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by alex mccown

Perhaps this gentleman would like to try out for the new reality television show premiering this fall: American Idle–searching the country over for America’s laziest person.

Posted at 2:29 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by Kevin

I believe Quake 3 allowed you to use any MIDI instrument as an input method, specifically added with foot pedals in mind.

Posted at 5:37 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by Karl

That midi stuff sounds cool. I’d like to play Quake 3 with my synth and record what it sounds like. It’d be lol, might end up creating some nice music :P

Posted at 5:51 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by TheKhakinator

yah i herd about that feture in quake 3 and i would love to hear that music lol i thought it was a way to control the midi output but nothing will beat Marathon including halo

Posted at 6:23 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by alex

Actually, being a laptop musician, I’ve considered many times trying to create a foot pedal board using the guts of a keyboard.

Posted at 7:57 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by xander

by the way: he built smip, not simp….

Posted at 8:02 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by Schnulli

hey xander, i’ve needed the same thing for sheet-music for a while. I made a two button pedal to handle page turning and some custom software to handle searching through my sheet music. If you’re interested, I posted instructions for the foot pedal at http://www.instructables.com/id/EOFT2S7LZYEP28720A/

, and the software is on my website at http://www.gschoppe.com/repertoire

I hope it helps

Posted at 9:53 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by greg schoppe

I just started working on a foot pedal set up from the guts of a cheap dell usb keyboard. Unfortunately I have not had time to map all the pin out combinations. But the controller board is small, about 1×2 inches, and the contacts are big enough to solder to. So building a multi pedal setup that can be configured to activate any key combination I want seems doable.

Posted at 9:58 am on Sep 5th, 2007 by punknubbins

I’ve heard of vi (the text editor) nerds using foot pedals mapped to the ESC key. This keeps the fingers on the home row, even when switching modes.

Posted at 12:12 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by Wally Glutton

would be grate to use this for racing games, just use 2 of the pedals, would love to try this my self 1 day

Posted at 1:56 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by Mark

i’ve actually been looking for a *cheap* USB connected, single button footpedal for awhile.

i use push to talk setting for ventrilo, and that puts me down one easy-accesible key in games. i’d love to set the push-to-talk key to a pedal so i still have all my keys… especially since the only key i’ve found works out well for me (0/insert) dosen’t work when i have foward and right arrows pressed (basically while i’m moving diagonally i can’t talk, which sorta sucks for team comms).

Posted at 4:13 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by matt

Andrew Huang (bunnie of xbox hacking fame) did something similar about 5 years ago, with footpedals hacked to replace both ctrl & shift to make working in emacs a bit easier on the carpal tunnel. Not quite the same as contolling the scroll wheel, but hey. I remember walking into his room/board fab back in school and thinking this was pretty damn cool. Two legs bad, Four legs better!
http://www.bunniestudios.com/bunnie/proj/keypedals/

Posted at 6:05 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by t0m

how does he use a keyboard with it since it requires a free ps/2 port?

Posted at 6:46 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by andrew

You know, my old Logitech Elite keyboard has a little scroll wheel built into it right by the normal left hand position… you can scroll it pretty easily and quickly with your pinky. I’m surprised he’d never stumbled on one of them, since the Logitech keyboards with them are usually not overly expensive (albeit the aforementioned model was recently discontinued). My current Microsoft Natural 4000 also has a little zoom slider in between the two sets of keys, and could probably easily hacked with an xmodmap setup or a custom keymap to trigger scroll events.

Posted at 10:03 pm on Sep 5th, 2007 by R4V3

matt,

couldn’t you buy a cheap USB keyboard, and just wire a pedal to complete the circuit between a few of the pins? You’d have to test them after hooking it up to see what pins you’re actually connecting together to find out the button combination… but the keyboard controller PCBs are quite small and you can get a cheap keyboard for < $10.

Posted at 12:16 am on Sep 6th, 2007 by n3rrd

I just plugged in a second “mouse,” in this case a big serial-port trackball. I can toe the center button for autoscroll and roll my foot on the ball to control the speed. Hand or foot, both “mice” work under Windows XP.

Posted at 8:11 am on Sep 6th, 2007 by Izzy

I have wondered about hacking a pedal onto my scope, so that I can do “force trigger” and things like adjusting the timebase while both hands are holding the probes onto the pcb. But I really need more than one button, so how about starting with a MIDI organ footboard? If there’s someone out there who could hack together a MIDI interface, a microcontroller, and an RS232 output (to connect to the scope), I reckon it could actually be a marketable product.

Posted at 10:14 am on Sep 6th, 2007 by Phil

#13: andrew, I use a USB keyboard, and plug smip into the PS/2 port.

Posted at 1:47 pm on Sep 6th, 2007 by iank

#15: that’s essentially what smip /is/, except I did it with a PS/2 keyboard (as that’s the only thing I had available).

Posted at 1:49 pm on Sep 6th, 2007 by iank