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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."
No, USB foot pedals have been around for ages. I'm not sure what is unique about this one other than maybe having more switches?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I guess three foot switches is not enough to be called a controller, but obviously "the world’s first foot controlled digital interface" is not factually correct. For that matter, there have been foot mouse interfaces appearing for twenty years.
And not for other OSes?
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!
Finally, I can have my Windows reboot pedal. That could be a real timesaver.
> I always wondered why they never took off.
Because they're on the floor, stuck under your foot?
Duh.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
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.
There are some people who have converted church organ pedeals into a digital interface:
http://nearlydeaf.com/?p=827
moox. for a new generation.
As it so happens I played with one of these things for a few hours (friend got one for a music setup). When I first saw it, I was excited and was seriously considering buying one for myself, since I love having access to more ways to design shortcuts and streamline my computer work-flows. Alas, I was quite disappointed with it. The main problem are:
1. The buttons are flat and small (compared to a foot, I mean), making it hard to know which button you're actually touching. If you're shoe-less, then you can feel around with your toes, and figure out which button is which (though this is pretty slow). With shoes on you have no hope of knowing where you're hitting without actually looking. This rather defeats the idea of having a foot pedal for computer control. At best, you could program this to be perhaps 3 keys (by grouping the left keys, the middle keys, and the right-most 'direction-pad' to trigger three different functions).
2. The buttons have effectively no 'give' or feedback. The only way I knew I was actually pressing the buttons was seeing the triggers in the programming application. This has the unfortunate effect of causing you to press the keys really hard, so that you know you've activated them, which gets annoying and tiring very quickly.
3. No Linux support. It can probably be done with a bit of effort (I gave up getting it to work in Linux after some testing I did on OS X revealed the above flaws), but there is no official support.
Basically, the ergonomics of the device are terrible. I don't understand how this could be useful even for a musician, since they too would want something that they can find with their foot without looking, and know that they've triggered it (a traditional guitar foot pedal has nice feedback). I would not recommend this product.
Incidentally, I have the same complaint about the Fragpedal Deluxe: the buttons have essentially no give, and take too much force to activate. I'm still searching for a good USB foot pedal that has a satisfying key-like feedback and ergonomics properly designed for activation by, you know, a foot.
this controller is one of the first we've ever seen that sits on the floor
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
The first computer foot pedal I read about was a do-it-yourself job in a computer magazine back when eight-bit megahertz microprocessors without hardware multiply were the latest great thing, and shortly after the period when every home computer user needed an oscilloscope.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Secretaries and those who do medical transcription have been using them for years.
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 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
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.