Fleamarket pedal

5 Euro foot pedals from a flea market. At first I thought it might be a sewing machine pedal, but seeing as it is pretty heavy and has two pedals so I don't know.

I had no fitting DIN connector and the cable smelled so strongly of old house, I got rid of the cable altogether.

Opening the box was not obvious. I had to tear off the soft rubber bottom to reach the screw that holds the pedal axle in place. (The tiny hole in the axle of the loose pedal at the top image).

These machine screws were mightily stuck and I may have contributed to bending them, when trying to "open" the axle from the end.

Inside there was a tiny surprise: There were more parts than I would have expected. What does the cog do?

First I thought there was some complex system for softening the punch for the microswitches. Which it probably kind of does too...

But the pedals are not both on-off switches. The left one has a mechanical flip-flop latch that keeps the switch "pressed". Were there no microswitches with this functionality?

The left pedal then controls whether the right pedal presses go through at all.


Using the pedal

I had some visions about using the pedal as a second fire button on C64, or controlling my own programs through Arduino serial. Or a weird chess clock.

But, first, the pedal could be used in something that actually needs a pedal.

Enter the Alesis Samplepad Pro, another recent cheap acquisition. It's an electric drum kit that can be played with drumsticks.

There's not much pro about it, as it has a widely known crosstalk problem between the pads. But fortunately by adjusting the individual pad sensitivy values the problem can be practically removed.

My approach so far has been to make Kick, Snare and Hi-Hat more sensitive (6) and concentrate on using them. The rest of the pads can have level 2 sensitivity.

Now if the kick drum could be delivered with pedal, I could remove that pad from the equation altogether.

The Samplepad Pro has a pedal option for kick drum and hihat, and I could connect the pedal microswitch easily to this connector. I soldered in some cables, of course missing the right connections at first, but finally it worked.

Here I've used the 'trigger' option. Possibly the 'switch' allows a velocity control through a resistor.

Well, honestly I can't play at all, but already could see it would make more sense to have a pedal together with the pads. It's a bit dificult to generate proper patterns by using drumsticks alone, even though the geniuses in Youtube can do that too. Then again using both feet and hands is another level of motoric articulation and it doesn't come too easily either.

Well, the ergonomics of the situation now weigh much more heavily than when just using drumsticks. It's also blindingly obvious the pedal is not really suitable for a musical instrument. Ok, so I had to remove the rubber footing that would have kept it better in position, but I doubt if it would help that much.

No wonder the add-on pedals easily cost as much as the second-hand Samplepad.

Trigging the kick was not as accurate as I would have expected. If I make a steady rhythm it will pick all microswitch clicks accurately. But if I click it in really rapidly, only the first goes through. I'm wondering if this is a problem (or intentional design) with the Samplepad input detection, or with the microswitch itself.

So, a nice junk find that at least motivated me to do something more material after a long while.