Google Reader Pedal: hacking a USB keyboard

Matt Richardson says:

First of all, thank you for writing Made by Hand.  It was such a great read, and it got me so psyched up to start making stuff... anything I could think of!  It also got me motivated to put together a few video tutorials, but my most recent one makes me the most proud.  It’s a “Google Reader Pedal,” which I made for a friend that wanted an easier way to scroll through her unread items on Google Reader.

• [acmeaviator]

  Awesome – will be hacking in a bunch of new switches in my simpit this weekend:)

• [Anonymous]

  Maybe a daft question, but does this work in parallel to the existing keyboard, or do you have to unplug the alphanumeric keyboard?

• [dainel]

  I’ve tried multiple USB keyboards attached to the same computer. They all work at the same time. So there is no reason why you would have to unplug your keyboard.

  I’ve made something like that, but much cheaper. Two pieces of scrap wood, two wooden clothes peg for the hinge and springs, a couple of screws, two wires attached to the parallel port. It takes just 5 minutes to make a trivial program that polls the parallel port and send a keystroke when the circuit closes.

• [certron]

  Screw pedals, I want a custom control panel. Guess I know what I’m going to test out this weekend…

• [Anonymous]

  Cool hack, but the parts are way too expensive to motivate it. You can buy a usb foot switch for 10$ all done including shipping. But if I had a spare keyboard AND a spare foot switch (from a sewing machine perhaps) I’d fo for it.

• [Anonymous]

  Another less permanent option would be to, instead of using keyboard electronics, use an old USB joystick and bind it to practically any button, then use something like AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/ – Windows only, but GPL) to bind it to whatever key you’d like, or possibly sequence of keys. That way it would just be a joystick input, commonly ignored, that you could reroute through software to do whatever you need.

  I sorta do this now, with the strum bar on an xbox guitar, but having a real pedal would be much nicer.

• [Anonymous]

  Why not use the ‘J’ and ‘K’ keys to navigate?

• [Anonymous]

  hahaha. way back when in the 90′s, we used to joke about the “foot mouse”.

• [holtt]

  The U-Hid Nano is a pretty cool little circuit for this kind of thing. See http://www.u-hid.com/home/uhid_nano.php

  A while back I took an old game controller (OLD game controller, DB-15 style), gutted it, put two large buttons on top, and put the U-Hid Nano inside. It gave me a game controller-style input device with just two large mashable buttons on top.

  The specific application was for disabled gamers who want a game controller, but can’t handle all the buttons.

• [holtt]

  Oh also this same kind of hack shown in the video can be done with a USB numeric keypad if you don’t mind it being 0-9 and a few things like +, – and so forth. I have picked up brand new USB keypads at Good Will (in the US) for gutting for projects at $3.95 a pop, brand new in their plastic.

• [Anonymous]

  I recently did almost the same thing, to get pedals in Ableton Live
  http://blog.gregerstoltnilsen.net/2010/09/pedals-for-ableton-live/

  • [hadlock]

    This is way better than the IBM-M keyboard with all the letters popped off that most people link to. I can see tons of uses for this! Do you have more photos you could share?

    Came here to post this link (freeware, not mine): http://www.hidmacros.eu/

    At work we do a lot of work with excel doing data matching, and we all have second keyboards we use just for excel macros/complex but common steps. I’ve had to paint my “macro board” another color but having an extra 101 keys to bind stuff to is a fantastic help. The problem before this software was that it was very difficult to determine which keypress was coming from which keyboard. This freeware makes it really easy.

    Re: video – seems he could have just snapped off all the keys except the left control and numpad enter key and remapped the keys on that keyboard using hidmacros, and paneled over the rest of the keyboard for a lot cheaper