$12 USB Pedals = Excellent

Spending many many hours in front of the computer, both for work and leisure; I've invested heavily in setting up the best human-computer interface I could. Even tiny improvements in productivity add up quickly when multiplied by the hours/month/years I'll be able to take advantage of them.

In that spirit I don't shy away from tools or systems that have steep learning curves if I believe they offer some efficiency improvement once mastered. This has pushed me towards things like Linux, the dvorak key layout, GNU Emacs, and the Kinesis keyboard.

[Here is a picture of my desk at work. I've attached a large touchpad to the top of my keyboard so I can put the entire keyboard in my lap and not have to move my arms to use the mouse.]

Obviously having the above sitting on your desk at your office, makes you stick out a little (especially in conformist Japan). During one discussion with a coworker I was joking that the Kinesis even offers an optional foot pedal for those interested.

Now at least the old Kinesis foot pedals simply generated a key press to help with something like holding down the shift key to reduce strain on your hands or arms. Thinking further though, I wondered if someone hadn't come out with a generic USB foot pedal that could do something more.

While still chatting with my coworkers a quick search turned up exactly what I was looking for. Amazon now sells a $12 USB foot pedal!

Some Googling around quickly determined that these pedals have some driver software that's leaves you a little wanting, but which updates the hardware so it knows which key press to transmit when stepped on. A number of issues here, yada yada yada; but the hardware will connect to anything using the USB HID keyboard driver!

I didn't want to mess with the hardware, but I figured if it used a standard USB keyboard driver then I could code something up and make it do whatever I so desired ($ sudo make me a sandwich).

Talking to a friend about my idea, he later pointed me to Aleksandr Levchuk's VIM Clutch which was the exact kind of thing I wanted to do. Still wanting a bit more flexibility to define pedal actions, and to prevent burning myself while soldering; I just tossed together a tiny ruby script/driver to handle the pedal.



Now after getting everything working, using ruby and libusb; I've re-created the VIM clutch in software using the xautomation package. You can drop in your own onpress and onrelease functions though to enable the above script and $12 pedal to do anything you want.

I still haven't decided how to best use my new pedal yet, but here are a few ideas;

• Play/Pause for music
• Meta-key for Emacs
• Bring my chat window to center screen when pressed, then return when released
• Record keyboard macro for Emacs while held down, playback macro when pressed quickly.
• Next tab in Firefox

One of the nice things of implementing the driver in Ruby, is that I can easily have it do all of the above just by detected what my active window is.

Anyways, hope this helps!