Usb foot pedals

I have this really dirt cheap pedal set I bought for not very much money from eBay (I think?) which I would love to be able to use as a midi device for toggling pedals or using with superlooper.

Trouble is, you could do that with midi, but this is not a midi device.

Plugged into my pc, it is recognised as a keyboard. Not a midi keyboard, just a keyboard.

If I open notepad, and press the 3 pedals I see the letters a,b and c. That’s all.

Tbh, I am struggling to even research this because any search term with both keyboard and midi in it means different things than this.

Any ideas?

Absolutely. I happen to have two of them.

The keybinding section in

allows you to use CUIA or key presses to do things . . .

Just plug the footpedal into the zynthian and select the required functionality in the above screen . . . :slight_smile:

If you want to use two foot pedals at the same time simply remap the keys on one of them using the supplied software, which I’ve got if you need it.

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Futuristic poems only with the letters a, b and c?

Well look what nature managed with bases…AGCT… …

Ah cool… This thing just keeps getting better! Which actions can I use for superlooper?

Snap! I have one of those pedals too. I like the idea that it simply works like a USB keyboard. No need for drivers & you can use it to control any SW (…if you can remap the keys). I used it with Soundplant to trigger samples during a performance.

Not tried anything with souperlooper. There’s been a bit of discussion about SL but mostly about gui implementation

Ah shame… I want to be gui free and on the floor, because I want to loop live instruments not synths.

I guess I now need some kinda ‘kB -> midi’ truck, maybe?

I’ve got one of those, and there is a linux utility somewhere to reprogram its emitted key values to something else, if you want to go that way

Yeah, but then I need to convert from key press to midi for the superlooper I think.

I am not at home at the moment, but I will look into this again when I am back.

There’s a section in the zynth webconf.

a section in the webconf to map a keypress to superlooper?

No yet. But how would you allocate the pedals?

So the foot switch is currently set to press a b or c like a typing keyboard at the moment… I would like to map those to the “play” “record” and “undo” toggles on the superlooper

Interesting pedal board setup…

Raspberry Pi s don’t seem ideal for embedded electronics, the Zero is extra slow booting, and there is the complication of shutting down properly so as not to chance corrupting the SD card.

Tiny core Linux which runs completely in RAM, so there are no CD card cache files to worry about, speeds startup as well.
Here’s one kinda old article on PiCore, referencing version 9.0, it’s currently up to ver 13.0 (54Mb DL)

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Arduino boards provide near instant startup , and have built in ADC for potentiometer inputs, some processors have built in HID, USB MIDI capability including the cheap pro Micro and the Teensy line.

Here’s one build a pedal article, and the video.

Did we ever get anywhere with doing this in a sane way that makes Souperlouper controllable with 3 keys?

zynthian-souperlouper

No! I wonder if they is merit to allow binding keys to CC?

A mechanism that allows Sooperlooper to be operated by footpedals would seem very useful, even if it involves qwerty keypresses generating MIDI signals to be passed on to the appropriate MIDI channel for sooperlooper.

If you check out this thread you will see that footpedal control is possible with the right pedal. I am investigating the option of adding MIDI CC as a CUIA which would allow you to bind keys to CC but this may not make it into testing / next stable.

[Edit] I have a PoC working in a development branch which allows configuration of keybinding to CC:

  • Value 1 sent when key pressed, nothing sent on key release
  • Value 1 sent when key pressed, value 2 sent when key released
  • Value 1 & value 2 toggled on each key press, nothing sent on key release

I think this covers most use cases. The main issue is that there is no linkage between the key state and the controlled parameter so at first boot or loading a new snapshot they could be out of sync resulting in the first press not toggling the state. (Only relevant for toggle.) This is based on some changed event handing in the dev branch that won’t be merged into testing until after the next stable release. I haven’t checked if it can be back-ported but the current development cycle kinda excludes this as it would delay development. But basically, it may be on its way…

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