Olympus RS26 foot switch

[pom-london]

I know (earlier) Olympus foot switches are said not to work with Express Scribe.

However, I have connected a new RS26 unit to COM1, and used a freeware program COMDebug (from http://www.taltech.com).

 

After ticking and then unticking the RTS box in COMDebug, the three lights higher up the screen faithfully change from red to green when the three switches on the RS26 unit are pressed. (The DTR box can be ticked or not.)

 

This is surely not a million miles away from working with Express Scribe (I hope).

 

To go into detail, the REWIND switch flashes the CTS light, the PLAY switch flashes the DSR light, and the FORWARD switch flashes the CD one.

 

(These three lights are not the same as your PEDALWIRING.HTML suggests, so I have wired a 9-pin lead to take pin 6 to pin 1, pin 8 to pin 6, and pin 1 to pin 8, and the lights are now as on that page.)

 

Now what, I wonder!

 

It would be acceptable to toggle the RTS line (with a switch) each time the RS26 had to work, so can you interface Express Scribe to respond to the CTS, DSR and CD signals (in either pattern)?

 

This would open up your product to lots of people who can buy the Olympus unit easily. (Also, the RS26 uses photocells rather than microswitches as perhaps other units do.)