Infinity Foodpedal External for Pd

Last updated: July 16th, 2014

infinity pedal

About

The VEC Electronics Corporation make a nice sturdy USB footcontroller, traditionally used by transcriptionists to reverse/play/pause/forward audio. These pedals generally retail for $50-60USD and are easily found through online shops. When I found the Infinity IN-USB-1 (local link) for $4.99 at the local Goodwill, I instantly thought it could be repurposed as a nice foot/stomp controller for Pd.

I purchased it, brought it home, searched around for ways to read it, experimented and failed to use HCS's HID and then decided to just write my own external + abstraction. I hate reinventing the wheel, but when the other wheels don't fit it's sometimes a necessity.

The original version in 2009 used a hacky scheme to read the usb device as a file.  Something (in the kernel?) changed and this hacky approach stopped working.  A rewrite was issued in summer 2014 and uses libhidapi for a more robust HID interaction.  Around this time, the code was also migrated to github.

Download

The code can be found in this GitHub repository:

https://github.com/breedx2/infinity-footpedal

Images

Since this is a software project, there really isn't much to show. The following are images of the pedal itself, the help patch, and a short demo video.