[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...