[PLUG] USB foot pedal controller

[Aaron Burt]

On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 10:53:31AM -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> If I wanted to use a USB foot pedal to control sound playback, would I 
> have to write something to go into one of the sound playing programs? Or 
> is there some way to make the three switches on the USB controller 
> generate the same signals used for play/pause, fast forward, and rewind?

Hard to say.  I don't know what the foot pedal looks like to the system.
("lsusb -v" or "usb-devices" would provide a huge amount of info.)

It might appear as a keyboard device that generates special keycodes, in
which case it'd be workable just by assigning keycodes.  If it appears as a
joystick or something else, a custom plugin for your media player could
handle it.  At worst, you could use a little daemon to listen and insert
keycodes. 

If you want to get wacky, you could make your own super-custom foot-pedal.
I've used a Teensy (USB Arduino clone) to generate keycodes and other USB
events based on switch and analog inputs.  It's really cool - you can turn
any sort of electrical input into a virtual keyboard or mouse.