NYC Resistor’s Trammell Hudson is using Midi effects pedals to create keyboard events like cutting and pasting.
I’ve recently switched to a standing desk from Geek Desk and wanted to be able to free my hands for more important things, like drinking coffee. The foot pedals are a cast off Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot controller, which outputs events as MIDI messages. To make it work with any computer without requiring additional software, I wrote a combination MIDI to USB HID mouse and keyboard converter that runs on a Teensy 2.0.
The Teensy translates the pedal events into various mouse or keyboard events (Escape to return to command mode in vi, Shift-Insert to paste the X11 cut buffer, mouse wheel events for the pedals, etc). Full source is available to build your own and configure your own mappings. Read on for some details on the hardware interface.
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