In June 2022 MSI put up a Kickstarter campaign for the MSI Liberator, a gaming foot pedal for your computer. Immediately it made so much sense and a foot pedal seemed like a great thing to learn build as something I could use for macros to beat repetitive tasks at work. And a new fun toy to play with when using my computer.
MSI Liberator
So inspired I drew up some rough designs on how to make my own.
Initial ideas sketching
Using these designs I went to my local scrap yard ish amazing maker store Reverse Garbage to look for parts or inspiration. And first thing I found that made me genuinely laugh out loud was a complete in box foot pedal for $15AUD. So obviously I just scrapped all my rough sketches then used that as the base. Olympus Foot Switch RS-28H is what I can find online however I believe it is likely to be an older version of it because even after using all the driver disks and everything I had I was unable to make it work as it came out of the box.
Olympus Foot Switch RS-28H
Rather than sitting around wasting my time trying to find long since gone drivers I decided to do the much easier thing which was to rewire the insides to an Arduino Pro Micro as the brain. While I was at it I also installed two extra buttons, one for mode switching and one as the reset button so I didn't need to open it again every time I wanted to program it. And 30 minutes of programming and using QMK tools and boom the Gamer Tootsie was complete.
Minimal spaghetti this time
All complete
Its best use case for video games is definitely Rainbow Six Siege. It was immediately so intuitive and because very fun to play. However in saying that I haven't found a great use for it yet as I don't play much siege. I think for how quick and cheap the project was I will absolutely find use for this at some point, even if just to go through slides during a presentation at the office.