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DIY USB Foot Pedal.


fender3x

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This is for the die hard DIYers out there...

 

I have made several serial port pedals. Increasingly, however, transcribers can't use them because their computers don't have a serial port. I have had hit-and-miss luck with USB-to-serial port adapters...but even when they hit, they generally take some tweaking.

 

I may be wrong, not having purchased a USB pedal, but most of the commercial pedals seem to have drivers that need installing. This board is full of problems with the various pedals and drivers.

 

So I kept looking for a better solution, and eventually stumbled on this YouTube video:

 

 

I took Matt Richardson's (the guy in the video) approach a little further to make a four button pedal. The pedal I made has, from left to right, REWIND/STOP/PLAY/FAST-FORWARD. This is accomplished by "re-purposing" the keyboard controller so that the buttons on the pedal activate F7/F4/F9/F8. In other words the foot pedal is essentially a keyboard with just four keys--those four function keys.

 

The lovely thing about this approach is that it will work with any computer that has a USB port. There are no special drivers needed, since as far as the computer knows, the foot pedal is a keyboard.

 

I used the same model keyboard that Mr. Richardson used, and have mapped a schematic for re-purposing it:

 

Dell L-100 keyboard to foot pedal schematic

 

I think a similar "hack" should work with other keyboards, but you'll need to map where the contacts go since it will be a bit different for every keyboard model.

 

I appreciate the help I have gotten here! Hope this helps someone else.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is accomplished by "re-purposing" the keyboard controller so that the buttons on the pedal activate F7/F4/F9/F8. In other words the foot pedal is essentially a keyboard with just four keys--those four function keys.

Could you trigger the play/pause, stop, previous track, and next track key codes from the dedicated keys on a multimedia keyboard?

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Could you trigger the play/pause, stop, previous track, and next track key codes from the dedicated keys on a multimedia keyboard?

 

I think you can pretty much create a pedal that will do anything that the keyboard will do using this method. That should include any non-standard keyboard buttons. I thought about adding more of the F-keys to my pedal, but figured it would get too complex to work without looking if I had more than four.

 

Because this pedal replicates keyboard keys, I needed to have separate buttons for start-stop. The play button does not toggle play-pause like a regular three button foot pedal. That said there is no reason that you could not wire up other keys to a foot pedal... Even if you wire it just the way my diagram does, you can re-assign the pedal keys from within ExpressScribe. It would not be difficult to switch the FF or RW for some key you´d rather have on the pedalboard.

 

Hope this helps!

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So I kept looking for a better solution, and eventually stumbled on this YouTube video:

 

 

Hallo, thank you for that trick. I think it is a good idea. Up to now, i want to get my serial pedal up and running.

 

If this fails, i will try this USB method.

 

But let me ask a question.

 

Your USB device emulates the Fx keys on a keyboard. So whenever you step on it, it sends an Fx-key.

When using Open Office, allmost all F-Keys are connected to a function.

That means,while wrting a text in OO, every step on this USB-pedal will start e.g. the spell-checking, the navigator, a new text window or whatever.

 

This definitly not intended. Of course, we can rearange any of the F-keys either in scribe or in OO, but this means changing the basic setup of either of the programs.

 

How did you solve that?

 

cu

Matthias

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hallo, thank you for that trick. I think it is a good idea. Up to now, i want to get my serial pedal up and running.

 

If this fails, i will try this USB method.

 

But let me ask a question.

 

Your USB device emulates the Fx keys on a keyboard. So whenever you step on it, it sends an Fx-key.

When using Open Office, allmost all F-Keys are connected to a function.

That means,while wrting a text in OO, every step on this USB-pedal will start e.g. the spell-checking, the navigator, a new text window or whatever.

 

This definitly not intended. Of course, we can rearange any of the F-keys either in scribe or in OO, but this means changing the basic setup of either of the programs.

 

How did you solve that?

 

cu

Matthias

 

I started out using DIY serial pedals. They worked great as long as there was a serial port. Most new computers don't have a serial port... so that's why I was looking for an alternative. I can get my serial pedals to work with a serial port adapter...but that requires installing a driver. This does not.

 

Up to now I had only tested this using MS Word, but I just tried it with OO.o Writer. It works just like with MS Word. If you have express scribe open, the "F" keys seem to belong to Express Scribe no matter what other programs or windows are active. The downside is that if you have Express Scribe open you probably cannot access the "F" keys in OO.o anyway. The good news is that the pedal seems to work just fine with OO.o with no adaptation or function-key re-mapping.

 

Full disclosure: I have only tried this in a Windows XP environment. Will report if I experience problems when I switch to Win 7 this month.

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Here's a cheap alternative for a USB foot pedal. Set me back by PHP100 (around $2.50 US)

 

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

 

I like that option. A little clunky but abjectly cheap! The hack suggestion that they suggest if you want to add more buttons is essentially the same as the keyboard hack. If you are going to do the hack, the keyboard option is better since it requires no special drivers to be installed...but for someone who just wants a cheap option that they can plug and play without soldering this is great!

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