SMIP – Footpedal Keyboard Input


[iank] is tired of reaching for his mouse to use the scroll wheel, so he built SMIP. He modified a musical sustain pedal (momentary on switch) to output an unused key combination. Then he mapped the key combo in X-windows to let him be extra lazy. There are plenty of ways to map keys – usb keypads, etc, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone try to replace a mouse command with a foot pedal.

21 thoughts on “SMIP – Footpedal Keyboard Input

  1. 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 ^-^

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

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