USB Foot Pedal

I needed to be able to turn the page in a sheet music organizer I made ( http://www.gschoppe.com/repertoire ), without stopping playing. After a bit of thought, this usb foot pedal was born. Some companies sell these for over $200. Mine cost $30-$40 to make.

Step 1 Purchase Materials

The main materials used were:

---

-2 SPST momentary switches from RadioShack
-1 RadioShack Project Box
-1 Mobility USB 2.0 Travel Hub (staples SKU #564851)
-1 GE retractable keypad (staples SKU #603891)
-1/16" sheet steel
-1 superpad extra large mousepad (staples again)

I also used:

---

-electrical tape
-metal screws
-cyanoacrylate(super glue)
-3m super 77 spray adhesive
AND
-conductive epoxy (if you're prepared)
OR
-hot glue and a circuit writer pen from radio shack (if you're down and dirty)

I'll add part numbers soon, but thats what I needed.

for tools, I used:

-a dremel
-a table saw
-a file
-a drill
-an adjustable wrench
-wire strippers
-soldering iron
-screw drivers
-basically, a well stocked workbench.

OK, now lets get down to buisness.

Comments

[ksharma1]

Raj Orien Industries offers medical transcription equipments in India such as transcription foot pedals , dictation headphones , Amplifiers. This company is from India and Having in this business from last many years.
Their website with Price list page :
http://www.rajorienindustries.com/price-list.html

[pinoytranscription]

Here's another alternative using an el-cheapo USB gamepad

http://pinoytranscription.blogspot.com/2010/09/diy-usb-foot-switch.html

Got the gamepad for PHP100 (roughly $2.50 US)

Works seamlessly with ExpressScribe.

[westfw]

Here's my "simplified" version.  I didn't need the USB pass-through option.  I had an existing footswitch that simply completed contacts in the attached cable.  And the PCB is from a full-sized USB keyboard (which is cheaper than a keypad, paradoxically, and often found in dumpsters due to broken or dirty keys, with electronics that work just fine.)  The original connectors for the flat mylar were removed with solderwick, and wires attached to the appropriate pins (which were determined by a combination of tracing the original keyboard, probing conductivity with a meter, and trail-and-error with the board connected to a PC.)  I still need a box of some kind for the board.  (I kept the original cable, because it's a nice flexible cable;  we'll have to see whether that's a good idea...)

[Alfred A. Amaus]

Looks something very similar to what they've done at Vashtisolutions.com with pedalbook and the transcription foot pedal. Looks like pedalbook is a sheet music organizer of sorts as well.

[alanofstbreward]

My wife has a knitting machine and a program called Designaknit. You should connect the machine to the PC with a very expensive serial cable which has a reed switch worked by a magnet to count the rows as the machine carriage moves back and forth. The program will also count a row every time spacebar (or up arrow)is pressed. I have tried to make a homemafe cable to do the same thing but I have not had much success, The problem seems to be that the program will not respond to Sendkeys in the way I think it should. Any ideas?

[killerjackalope]

did a pair of gutted PS2 foot pedals and a Usb adapter not seem easy or even pedals for computer games and a hardware assigner as I call them

[gschoppe]

yeah, that'd be bulky, I needed to bag em with a laptop, and I wanted software portability (i.e. no drivers or installs on any win 2000/xp/vista computer)

[killerjackalope]

hmm makes sense though finding a pedal that was double sided would be great for the switches and then using the mouse idea it's a good solution you have here though and if needed a third button could easily be added using extra keypad buttons

[computerthomasparks]

for hardware for mac i suggest controlermate for seting buttons and a gutted logitech attack 3 joystick because thay are esey to work with.

[radiorental]

you can do away with much of the hardware by using a two button wireless mouse.

[Lumpio-]

Indeed... this project uses way too much (expensive!) hardware for something so simple. I did something similar to this from an old broken USB-mouse, some semi-driver magic lets the OS distinguish between the actual mouse and the extra button thing. (I consider myself lucky for using Linux, you try telling Windows a mouse isn't a mouse!)

[gschoppe]

I can't see any difference in hardware requirements, cost-wise. the hub (i.e. the "expensive" (read 7.99) addition) is just there to allow a usb pass-through, so I don't waste a port (only 2 on my laptop) essentially, where you wired a mouse to 2 switches, I wired a keypad... they cost just about the same, and I didn't muck around with windows (or linux) drivers. BTW, its not really hard at all to tell windows that a mouse isn't a mouse, its just that repertoire (the intended use) is a program that I wanted to be able to run off a thumbdrive with no install, and I couldn't figure how to distinguish mice without an install of some sort.

[gschoppe]

ok, i've put a pre-alpha of the php for repertoire at http://www.gschoppe.com/repertoire/

try it out, and tell me what you think

[keng]

i have a cheap usb mouse hooked up and using quickmacros.com to assign it to all kinds of different things. currently it's my audio/video start/stop and volume up down.

[mikesty]

Care to share your code for this? <3

[keng]

if you have quickmacros (QM), i sure can but without quickmacros, i wouldn't know how to do it.

generally what you do is this.
you hook up the extra mouse (in my case mouse AND keyboard see http://geeknight.blogspot.com/2005/11/300-key-button-pad.html for the process i used to create this huge "button pad") to your pc and fire up a function in QM that watches/recieves the ids of the keyboard and mice that are sending signals. you create a macro that does what you need. in my case the macro turns the sound up when i roll the mouse wheel down (i have the mouse "upside down" to have easier access to the buttons). when QM sees mouse #2 do something that has a macro assigned to it, it interupts the signal and plays the macro instead.

[gschoppe]

also, this project could be done wirelessly using a wireless keypad, most notably available from targus or iconcepts' mobility line

[radiorental]

Very cool, when you upload the app I'd be very keen to look at it. I'm building a dance-dance-revolution system for people with disabilities. I was going to hook a wireless mouse in to an old skool Simple Simon game as the controler for people to tap out the sequence with their hands. Remap the mouse buttons to up/down/left/right but I think I'll use a wireless keypad now (I have a donor mouse but I think I'll side step the buttom mapping) Cheers - pauric

[gschoppe]

quick question, if I used a mouse, how do I distinguish it from my pointing device, so that it doesn't interfere with meaningful clicks... i need to be able to navigate with both a mouse and footpedal... also, I'll attach code tomorrow

[radiorental]

I may have misunderstood the application but I thought that this was a virtual page turner while the operator was reciting music. In this case you would either be operating the footswitch and music instrument, or operating the computer with keyboard/mouse. OS handle two meese pretty well. So, to put it another way, multiple input devices are ok. Just not simultaneously I think I may be coming across as dismisive of your project. Just providing an alternative that I'd do as I dont code. Another advantage as I see it is that browsers will resize images to the window or use the scroll wheel for 100% view. Dont know if this is relevent for sheet music on a normal monitor?

[gschoppe]

the problem with browser resize is that no current browser implements it well. In all major browsers you lose a lot of the readability.... I used php to resize the images to screen size on upload; the gd library does a much better job of resize than a browser...

I'm not trying to put down the mouse idea, i considered it, but couldn't figure out how to implement it without making the entire interface pedal driven... i needed to have both links for the mouse and pedal control.

btw, to use the foot pedal with an html file, just include the following javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">
function control(e){
var evtobj=window.event? event : e //distinguish between IE's explicit event object (window.event) and Firefox's implicit.
var unicode=evtobj.charCode? evtobj.charCode : evtobj.keyCode
var actualkey=unicode //String.fromCharCode(unicode)
if(actualkey == 37 || actualkey == 52)
{
location.href='url of previous page'
}
else if(actualkey == 39 || actualkey == 54)
{
location.href='url of next page'
}
}
document.onkeypress=control
</script>

[radiorental]

If someone didnt want to write such an application an alternative would be to drop the images to be displayed, in this case sheet music, in to individual html pages. Build a table of contents in to your index.html. Use a four button wireless mouse with scroll wheel to built a 3 pad foot swtich for Select (left mouse button), Back (back button) and forward (guess..) you could even incorporate a scroll wheel in to the footswitch and use your big toe to scroll up and down your table of contents on the fly. afanku very mucha

[mikesty]

How would you go forward? You'd have to preload all the pages to begin?

[radiorental]

Usually the 'back' & 'forward' buttons on these meese are programable. Now I'm not 100% up on my html but if its not possible to have a link to the next page highlighted on pageload then it should certainly possible with a sequence of tab-space if your mouse software allows. I think the MS app does it. good point, I had not thought that through.. but it should be easily overcome.

[gschoppe]

the reason for the keypad was to make the software side easy... my application is php based, so I just use javascript to detect keypresses.

The usb hub is only there to provide a passthrough. I didn't want to use all my usb ports on one project.

About Repertoire:
Repertoire is a PHP driven, thumbdrive based program that allows users to upload, organize, search, and display gif, jpeg, and txt based sheet music.

due to lisencing negotiations, I cannot make the full beta available yet, but I will release the php files on my blog in a day or so. its still beta, but it should fuction ok.

the foot pedal is used to switch pages in tunes with multiple pages, or to move between adjacent songs.

more information will soon be available at http://www.gschoppe.com/blog

[psdcc]

Great idea! Could you provide more information about the sheet music manager you developed?