[trailbits]

I can imagine this helping anyone that has struggled with computer-related overuse injuries. I had a bad case of tendinitis that made using a mouse or trackpad very painful. I would have loved to have this kind of device as another option.

[moffkalast]

I'm really wondering why nobody's selling a foot operated mouse yet, it would be pretty practical even for normal people when typing with both hands.

[hinkley]

Best I personally managed was push-to-talk via a foot pedal, to help with mic discipline in cooperative games without reducing my reaction time.

I'm not sure my feet have the accuracy to work as a mouse.

I think assistive devices do better as a class when some fraction of them are also usable or even attractive to able people as well. It gets us thinking about other modes of interaction and of course it brings the unit price for those items down out of the stratosphere.

Foot mouse will unfortunately stay niche, but when I saw the device in this article, I thought, "Why not for everybody?"

[Levitating]

> I'm not sure my feet have the accuracy to work as a mouse.

You should be thinking more of like a trackpoint for your feet/foot.

> Foot mouse will unfortunately stay niche, but when I saw the device in this article, I thought, "Why not for everybody?"

I can feel my tongue having a muscle ache just by looking at this.

[orosello]

Demo showing cursor accuracy and voice control/talking when the MouthPad is in the mouth:

* Only tongue tracking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH-z1KnIthM&t=1s * Head tracking mode (& wink to Neuralink demos :P) : https://youtu.be/6TTIsE4GMEU?si=TbS07BdjUaZDSwx4

Regarding fatigue: We constantly use our tongues for talking and eating without feeling tired and so far, current users haven’t reported tongue fatigue issues.

[moffkalast]

I don't get the tongue idea either, any kind of device you'd put in would make it hard to talk and who wants to eat a battery? Plus the movement area is pretty tiny.

Accurate foot movements are just training I bet, just like with anything else. Arm amputees have shown again and again that it's just a matter of practice. Plus, were any of us really that proficient with a mouse when we first started? We take it for granted but we've been honing that for decades.

> trackpoint

Looking at how that one works, it's just four load cells. That would be exceedingly simple to reproduce with a microcontroller that supports HID. I might actually try to make one.

[pzo]

You can try some rapid prototyping with microbit and this library below that has ble hid support

https://bsiever.github.io/microbit-pxt-blehid/

[trailbits]

I did experiment with using a trackball taped to the floor. It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot. I think using the tongue along the roof of your mouth would be more precise and less fatiguing. What was more useful was a set of 9 foot switches that could be programmed to send arbitrary keystrokes. I could off load from my hands the most common keypresses I do all day, for example: pageup, pagedown, tab, enter, backspace, mouse click, passwords... along with speech recognition software you can get at least non-coding tasks done without using your hands too much.

[prmoustache]

> It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot.

How long did you do your experiment? Obviously most of us are not typically used to point and move precisely with our feet. So to be efficient we would need to train for months but that doesn't mean we can't be precise with our feet if we were to dedicate enough time for it.

I once saw a documentary about a german woman who was born without arms. She would do everything with her feet, writing, drawing, smoking a cigarette or mounting a horse and holding the reins with one foot. We are much more adaptive than we think we are but we don't realize it when we have the luxury to not needing it.

[RogerL]

I went to grad school with a guy w/o arms. Sure, he could write with his feet. It was extraordinarily hard and difficult. Nothing changes the physical facts - we neither have the nerves or fine control in our legs/feet that are present in our hands.

We also build fine motor control in very young childhood; children can't color within the lines (for example) because the nerves just aren't there yet. I would expect someone born without arms to have better fine motor control of their legs than an adult that tries to develop the ability. And it takes them years - 7 or 8 years to get pretty decent control. Even if I had the neuroplasticity of a young child (I surely don't) I wouldn't want to spend years trying to develop that control.

I face this every day on the piano. You distribute motion between fingers, wrist, forearm, elbow, and shoulder based on the amount of fine control needed. Sure, you can use your shoulder to trill, but it is always going to be very slow and clumsy. finges are best, but you face fatigue, so you usually use wrist rotation to get muscles with more endurance suppling the gross motions, and then fingers for the fine control of dynamics. You can't change this physical reality, at the most you can compensate (e.g. someone with a fused wrist would have to find alternatives).

[fallingsquirrel]

Can you link the hardware you're using? I have one foot pedal for push-to-talk and I think more could be useful, but I don't want to tie up 9 USB ports.

[trailbits]

Yes, push to toggle microphone is another great use for these! I was using the Kinesis Programmable Foot Switch 26 years ago with ps/2 connectors (later they switched to USB). You would get 3 foot switches in each unit and chain them together along with your keyboard so they only used one host port. The most similar thing I see now would be https://www.amazon.com/X-keys-Foot-Pedal-Playback-Control/dp... It's frustrating that I can't reprogram my old foot switches since the manufacturer stopped supporting them. If buying today, I'd look for something based on open source QMK firmware like my keyboard uses. This project looks cool: https://github.com/christrotter/qmk_firmware/tree/arcboard-s...

[RogerL]

Lift your foot up and try to balance in your seat and see how it feels. Try using a standing desk with it. Put a pen between your toes and try to draw a square and feel major muscles in your upper thighs struggling to make these fine control motions. Put on high heels and try to do anything that isn't gross movement. Sit in a train/plane/car and think of trying to use a laptop with a foot controller. Heck, put your mouse on the ground right now, turn pointer speed down as slow as possible to accommodate the gross movements of your legs, and try to use it.

[pragma_x]

FWIW, I've considered mapping a midi pedal board to meta keys and macros before. That alone could be useful - you'd go from a typist to something like an organist.