Simulating Mouse Events With Piezo Foot-pedals and Arduino

If you work hard and intensively with a computer mouse and keyboard, you might sometimes get sore wrists. I find that my left hand is sensitive to that. I do a lot copy paste and alt-tab short cut movements. And if you do it intensively for hours and days then what is known as “Carpal tunnel syndrome” maybe the unpleasant “unexpected” surprise.

But sometimes you need to work regardless. So here is one solution. Let’s distribute the workload from hands,fingers and wrists to feet. In this project I first experimented with foot switches. The foot switches I found initially were rather noisy so I decided to experiment with piezoelectric sensors and found out that they work excellently. Now I can tap with my feet several shortcuts and these taps are also quite silent.

So here is what you need:

• Arduino board
• piezo sensors
• 1MΩ resistors
• wire
• optional: door mat
• optional: PCB Circuit Prototype Board for diy Arduino shield
• optional: Pin Header Strip Row for Arduino shield
• optional: enclosure

Nice intro for using piezo with Arduino: https://monctonlife.com/2018/01/piezoelectric-sensor-interfacing-with-arduino.html

In my piezo-“foot pedal” unit I have 5 piezos to trigger these events in computer:

• left mouse click
• windows switcher (Win+Tab)
• mouse drag
• double-click
• right click

Source code:
https://github.com/juyshy/Foot-pedals-as-pc-controllers