Hidden Agenda Is an Results Pedal for Laptop Keyboards and Mice

A clear electrical guitar sign does not sound significantly fascinating. It’s like an acoustic guitar, however with much less heat and resonance. Many of the electrical guitars you hear in rock, pop, and steel music use results, which alter the audio sign indirectly. Probably the most well-known and widespread is distortion, which mimics the impact of an over-driven tube amplifier to impart noise into the sign. However there are various, many others. Man Dupont took that concept and utilized it to computer systems by constructing an results pedal referred to as Hidden Agenda that alters keyboard and mouse enter.

That most likely does not make a lot sense to you, as a result of mice and keyboards are digital enter units and there’s no analog sign to change. How does one distort a sign from a mouse that tells a PC to maneuver the cursor to a selected coordinate? Dupont needed to get inventive as a way to translate the summary concept of various results into algorithms that might apply to computer systems and mice.

For instance, one of many results that Dupont created for mouse enter is reverb. Within the audio world, reverb is a bit like echo — although echo is definitely one other distinct impact. Reverb seems like a loud sound in a big room with laborious partitions, like if you happen to yelled inside a racquetball courtroom. To offer a mouse reverb, Dupont programmed the cursor to have momentum. When turned up, the cursor retains shifting for a noticeable distance after the consumer stops shifting the mouse.

There are a number of of those “results” that apply to the mouse, however Dupont additionally programmed some for keyboards. The pitch shift impact, as an illustration, strikes up or down the unicode record when the consumer presses a key. With it turned up barely, pushing the “b” key will end result within the letter “c” showing. With it turned down barely, “a” will seem. When in harmonizer mode, it’s going to sort all three letters like a barbershop quartet singing in unison.

On the {hardware} aspect, Dupont achieved this utilizing a customized PCB populated with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. It reads the enter from the mouse or keyboard by way of USB, adjusts that in accordance with the chosen impact, after which sends the modified enter to the PC by way of USB. So far as the PC is aware of, it’s receiving normal USB HID enter. That customized PCB features a rotary encoder and a stomp change, identical to the sort you’d discover on a guitar results pedal. These all match right into a 1590B pedal enclosure with some neat paintings on prime.