Capacitive contact has taken over our on a regular basis lives. Telephone screens, good assistants, tablets, there are touchscreens in every single place! However perhaps your ft don’t get sufficient consideration. I imply, they’re completely usable limbs! Effectively, the RP20-Footie is a good little board from JC Gadgets that means that you can use a footswitch for absolutely anything.
It may be configured to work like a macropad, merely sending particular keystrokes if you contact a pedal. Or it may very well be used to ship MIDI instructions and set off sounds, lights, or the rest you would possibly wish to automate. We’ve seen some hardcore emacs/vim customers with foot pedals, particularly to hit modifier keys and assist forestall repetitive pressure harm.
One of many advantages of capacitive contact is that it takes virtually no stress in any respect to set off. This will or is probably not good on your specific setup, however not having to press down along with your foot may also forestall doable RSI. The contact pads additionally give this board a particularly skinny profile in comparison with conventional switch-based actuators. And capacitive contact might be triggered a lot sooner than a change, which could even be a plus.
JC Gadgets has based mostly this across the ever-present Raspberry Pi Pico, so software program customization will probably be pretty straightforward. With the proper libraries, a number of small modifications are all that might be wanted to customise this gadget to your specific use case. It’s doable to easily wire the pads up as switches; add an opto-isolator and you may interface to absolutely anything.
Realizing Jeremy, if you happen to run into hassle with the RP20-Footie in any approach, he’ll be there to assist determine it out. So not solely are you serving to help a fellow hacker, you’ll even be getting top-notch help!
