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USB Foot Controls
MojoKid writes "When it comes to controlling your favorite PC title, you've got a few options. There's a mouse. There's a keyboard. There's a control pad and the joystick. Now, there's one more option apparently. Keith McMillen Instruments (KMI) announced today the SoftStep KeyWorx multi-touch foot controller, the world's first foot controlled digital interface. Available for Mac and Windows, this controller sits on the floor. The company claims that it has multiple uses for gamers, video editors, programmers, data entry professionals, disabled people, repetitive stress syndrome sufferers, etc. It's both pressure and location sensitive, USB-powered, and contains ten fully customizable keys that remember up to 100 sets of commands for repetitive tasks."
That wasn’t meant to be facetious I just assumed this already existed. Maybe not with pressure/location sensitive buttons in this exact incarnation... but I assumed the basic idea of “USB connected foot board” was already around.
I currently use my computer as a guitar amplifier (not as bad as it sounds really, with a decent (or even shitty) guitar interface/DI, impendence matcher, guitarix/rakarrack/jack-rack and all the assorted jack DAW stuff.. it’s actually pretty good (or at least good enough for an amateur like myself).
I had planned at some point on getting some kind of computer connected foot switch board (I’ve seen MIDI versions of this) to control the virtual effect pedals, and just assumed this kind of product already existed. If it doesn’t and this is the cheapest they come maybe I’ll be building my own ;p
No, not again!?! Leroy, you jerk!!!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Not me, that's for sure.
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MOMO-Racing-Wheel-pedals-button/dp/B00006JJIC
I pretty sure PC sim rudder pedals and or steering wheel pedals can claim prior art on the "world's first foot controlled digital interface"
Good-bye
One of the first ideas I had for a tablet for musicians was to display sheet music. The only trick is flipping the page. Granted, this is easier with a tap than a real page turn, but it could be even easier with a foot pedal.
A bluetooth "keyboard" could do this nicely and connect to hardware like the ipad without any special driver support. USB not so much, but presumably one of the other tablets out there could be made to work. If you have lots of people, though, bluetooth might suffer from interference.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
The pedal looks a lot like an effects pedal board. It could be useful for "home studio" type stuff.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
And not for other OSes?
yes there are a lot of midi pedals, but this looks nice, quite configurable, i wonder what is the latency for playing it in real time.
When you play a FPS you can actually use your feet to WASD.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That's a great idea! All that matters is what your boss can see, there's no way your internet connections could be logged by a server in another room!
Should you not have bought a brand new shiny pair of shoes for this demo? :)
The price seems, how do I say this politely... a bit steep. You could pick up a second hand MIDI foot controller and something like Bome's MIDI translator, midiStroke or bash something together in the programing language of your choosing. And I know at the very least the GIMP supports MIDI input devices, I wouldn't be surprised it there are other programs that do not as well.
Finally, I can have my Windows reboot pedal. That could be a real timesaver.
What about Power Pad?
Looks extremely awkward to use. Was hopping it was more of a gesture based thing. Moving your foot around and hitting locations on a pad without looking just seems difficult.
I for one welcome our new computer rebooting overlords!
When a company says that they're the first to provide something to a consumer, it just makes me want to wait for the 2nd or 3rd iteration. The first always has bugs, is always more expensive, and is always improved upon. Thanks for letting me know not to consider your product, guys. In the meantime I can just use USB racing pedals, they seem to work pretty well at doing the same thing, and the buttons aren't as tiny as the one in the submitted article.
Twinstiq, game news
Nice. A little pricey for what it is ($79 for a pedal-less bluetooth transmitter?) but such is the ways of a relatively niche product.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
One of my EE professors in college drove a trackball with his feet while both hands typed away. Really impressive to watch.
....like some welfare bum laughing as my fingers pound endlessly away at the keyboard. 10 Fingers plus 10 Toes = DOUBLE PRODUCTIVITY!!!!!
I considered getting something like this for my digital art setup. Right now i have an old tabletpc with a nostromo speedpad 51n. In my right hand holds a stylus and my left is on the speedpad. The idea is that I never have to touch the toolbar or the menu with the hand that i draw with. It's very liberating to switch from paintbrush to eraser and to zoom in and out without doing all kinds of keyboard combos. The only problem is that you can't modify color in Photoshop, but you can with GIMP.
Has no one ever heard of midi foot controllers?
My restless leg syndrome might cause the controls to go haywire and open undesirable websites, though.
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
Next, power steering with cruise control. Browsing the internet will be like cruising the interstate.
What would be cooler would be a computer with a crank.
MAME supports a "spinner", which amounts to a one-dimensional mouse with a dial. Unlike a "paddle", a spinner has no left or right rail. Attach the appropriate handle, and you have your crank.
After all, this is multi-touch with feet and not multi-touch with fingers....
Secretaries and those who do medical transcription have been using them for years.
One of the first ideas I had for a tablet for musicians was to display sheet music. The only trick is flipping the page.
If the tablet has a microphone, it can detect what pitch the musician is playing, match recent pitches to the notes of the piece to find how far the musician is through the piece, and scroll the next line of measures into view.
If you have a decent flat surface and take your shoe off you can use a normal mouse perfectly well with your foot. Decent control (gets better with practice, and it feels like having fine control over your leg should be useful for something), and leaves both hands free for the keyboard.
I am trolling
I hacked together a 3 peddles deal that was wired directly into a PS-2 mouse. Saved my hands when I was doing hours of 3D modeling. Drove my neighboring cube buddies crazy with the endless clicking. This was 1998, and I got the idea from a guy who did it at least three years earlier. In 2008 I bought an off-the-shelf 3 paddle USB foot input from a place called Fentech. This new device mentioned here might have directional control that will slew the mouse using four arrow peddles. Similar devices have been available on the assistive technology market for quite a few years.
When do we get a breath controller like the Yamaha DX-7 had?
There are lots of them. You can even use a wireless mouse on the ground (wedge it in place with something) with the left/right buttons mapped to forward/back in a PDF. Foot pedals for turning pages is easy. The main problems with sheet music on a laptop/tablet have been:
.mus (Finale) file or MuseScore or LilyPond.
- All the tablet screen sizes are too small - 10.1" max. Letter is equivalent to 13.9", A4 equivalent to 14.3", and the Henle Urtext pages are equivalent to 15.3". Yes the edges of the pages are blank, but they're still substantially larger than any tablet.
- They're too low resolution. The iPad looks like it would work, but 1024x768 is simply inadequate for any complex scores. It turns many of the details of an intricate Chopin or Listz score into a blurry mess. e-ink should have the advantage here, if it didn't take so long to turn pages.
- Laptops have pretty much all become widescreen 16:10 (1.6) or 16:9 (1.78). The old 4:3 (1.33) is nearly ideal for displaying letter (1.29) or A4 (1.41) sized sheet music with minimum wasted screen space. The Henle Urtexts are 1.32. Yes you could re-encode sheet music to fit the widescreen aspect ratio, but that gets to the last problem:
- AFAIK almost nobody is truly digitizing music. They're just scanning old sheet music into PDFs. The music score publishers are deathly afraid of going digital because they figure everyone will just copy all the scores instead of buying it from them. They've been milking the "change a few fonts and publish a new version with a new copyright" workaround to copyright expiration for centuries. So all that's left are independent musicians to take the time and effort to convert an out-of-copyright score into something like a
I ended up getting an old used tablet PC with a 1400x1050 12.1" screen.
I've done this with MIDI foot controllers before. If you count the fact that many MIDI devices also have USB interfaces, then this has been done before.
...when I was first mastering VI, a co-worker mentioned that he thought it needed a foot-pedal connected to the Escape key.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I think this might find applicability for amputees, and/or other disabled persons. Could be a boon for wounded vets, for example.
..though the tricky thing might be the initial setup, which seems to require a standard mouse at the very least.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I use an ipad for piano sheet music (Stanza has a beautiful interface to free music scores). Cropping out the margins with Goodreader helps tremendously.
Granted, I'm not playing unbelievably complex music, but classical pieces are often available from Mutopia and can be re-typeset to a smaller page size.
Your point about eink is hogwash: they are not high resolution screens. In tricky lighting situations an ipad is much nicer. This is coming from a Kindle owner. Eink can be deceiving about its resolution for two reasons: there are no tiny spaces between "pixels", and the fonts are highly optimized for the exact screen configuration. This eliminates antialiasing and the fuzziness you perceive. It does not help at all for music scores.
See Mutopia. This is better for piano players than others, but it is the Project Gutenberg of the music world. As for more modern music, you're stuck with scanned PDF. Of course, if you know you're going to do that, you can try to find music in a relatively small page form factor suitable for viewing on a 10" portrait screen with cropped margins.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Thinkgeek sold a Stealth Switch that did that for years, apparently they don't sell it anymore though. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/01/foot-activated-boss-button-enables-gaming-at-work/
"One can not truly appreciate Shakespeare until you have heard it in it's original Klingon" -Star Trek
1. Get a Comfy keyboard.
2. Remove baby stickers.
3. Attach to USB port.
Voila, a foot keyboard for $80.
I saw foot controls (on one of the Lisp Machines) in 1980. (I doubt that was the first time someone did that, either.)
I can now have 8 additional new modifiers for my emacs configuration :)
-- the cake is a lie
It might have also been possible to map from joystick to keyboard events too. The pressure sensitivity of the posted device probably makes it more useful.
Digitizing music has been going on for quite some time--the best of the apps is PhotoScore:
Neuratron PhotoScore
You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.
I used to work in a Chemistry lab. It was often that my hands were busy AND I needed to press space bar so some dumb software can start it's analysis.
Back in the day, I had thrustmaster peddles, joystick, and throttle. They were the last of their kind to be made, even by thrustmaster, that would recognize more than one button push at a time. I wonder if this suffers the one button at a time limit.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I believe the first Rat was back in original mac days and was in fact branded as a 'Rat'.
I suspect Rats are one place where a single button is the correct ergonomic solution (at least for people with functioning hands).
Many believe the name killed the concept.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You'd still need three legs to ctrl-alt-delete.
As an emacs user I'm looking forward to a new level of complicated chording commands. I won't have to use my nose to hit keys anymore!
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
I doubt it's the first. A quick google search shows that there are at least a dozen similar existing products. Also, I'm sort of disappointed by the "multi-touch" feature. When I read that, I was imagining two iPads -- one for each barefoot. As it stands in this case, multi-touch just means multi-buttons.
So by that definition, all phones (with more than one button) are "multi-touch" as well.