MIDI Foot Pedal

The music director for whom I made my first MIDI controller asked me to make a foot pedal that he could add to his slew of already-in-use foot pedals for a production of "Something Rotten!". He wanted it to be fader-style and narrow enough to not take up too much more space under his keyboard. My first thought when tasked with designing a fader would be a slide potentiometer, but he wanted more length than I was able to get out of a slide pot. He needed it pretty quickly and I was in the midst of many projects for school, so my thrown-together solution wasn't perfect, but it got the job done and fit his needs. To reduce fabrication time, I bought a small (and cheap!) linear bearing slide rail to provide smooth movement, and then I designed a 3D printed carriage extension to house a rotary encoder attached to the carriage of the slide rail. I designed a system inspired by the rack and pinion systems I had recently seen in my Machine Design for the Stage course, with the rack fixed to the base of the unit and the pinion fitted onto the rotary encoder, so that when the carriage of the slide rail moved linearly, the pinion attached to the rotary encoder would spin, incrementing or decrementing the potion of the rotary encoder and giving me data to work with in the microcontroller. I used an Arduino Pro Micro left over from another project and hooked the system up to the user's laptop via micro USB. The system works with any standard DAW and was used in this application with MainStage. Click through the photos below for more description!