Listen To Your Feet, They Have A Lot To Tell You

December 22, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 8 Comments

[Umar Qattan] is in tune with his sole and is trying hard to listen to what it has to say.

At a low level, [Umar] is building an insole with an array of force sensors in it. These sensors are affixed to a flexible PCB which is placed in a user’s shoe. A circuit containing a ESP32, IMU, and haptic feedback unit measure the sensors and send data back to a phone or a laptop.

What’s most interesting are the possibilities opened by the data he hopes to collect. The first application he proposes is AR/VR input. The feedback from the user’s feet plus the haptics could provide all sorts of interesting interaction. Another application is dynamically measuring a user’s gait throughout the day and exercise. People could save themselves a lot of knee pain with something like this.

[Umar] also proposes that an insert like this could record a user’s weight throughout the day. Using the data on the weight fluctuation, it should be possible to calculate someone’s metabolism and hydration from this data.

You’d Print A Part, But Would You Print A Foot?

October 27, 2017 by James Hobson 22 Comments

Born with just one foot, [Nerraw99] had to work around prosthetics all his life. Finally getting fed up with the various shortcomings of his leather and foam foot, he designed, tweaked, printed and tested his own replacement!

After using Structure Sensor to scan both his feet, [Nerraw99] began tooling around with the model in Blender and 3D printing them at his local fablab/makerspace: MakerLabs. It ended up taking nearly a dozen printed iterations — multiple printing issues notwithstanding — to get the size right and the fit comfortable. Not all of the attempts were useless; one version turned out to be a suitable water shoe for days at the beach!

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Heated Slippers Keep Your Feet Warm, Also Your House As It Burns To The Ground.

March 23, 2015 by Rich Bremer 20 Comments

Winter may be coming to a close but that doesn’t mean that feet are free from being cold. Sure, socks or slippers may help a little, or you can even turn up the heat in your home but none of those options are as fun or as dangerous as [Colin Furze’s] solution. He has come up with some crazy DIY heated slippers.

Sure, there’s battery powered heated slippers or even ones you can microwave to heat up but those are wicked boring. These puppies are actually gas powered and more resemble a small portable camping stove than any sort of footwear. Under each slipper is a custom-made burning chamber inside which is a small burner. Each slipper is supplied a constant flow of fuel from its own on-board gas can. Warming your feet couldn’t be easier, just turn on the gas and light the burner with a match.

It goes without saying but we should reiterate… Don’t try this at home! What you can try is watching the video of these slippers after the break.

[Colin Furze] is not new to having his projects on Hackaday. For more of his flame-based projects, check out his Pyro Gloves. And of course, who could forget these amazing retractable Wolverine Claws.

Continue reading “Heated Slippers Keep Your Feet Warm, Also Your House As It Burns To The Ground.” →

Simple To Build Programmable Foot Switches

February 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

programmable-footswitches

Your hands do a lot of work between the keyboard and the mouse, why the heck are you letting your feet be so lazy? [Dossier van D.] is putting an end to the podiatric sloth. He built this set of three foot pedals which have gone through two versions of functionality.

The buttons themselves are made from a base plate of plywood with a smaller piece on top for each ‘key’. The two parts are separated with some foam carpet pad, with a tactile push button in between to register a click. The only thing we’d change about this is adding a couple of wooden spacers next to the switch so that accidentally sanding on a button doesn’t break that electronic component.

Originally each button was soldered to a gaming controller. This worked just fine using button mapping, but recently [Dossier] made the switch to using an Arduino Leonardo. This is a perfect choice. Unlike input devices made with older Arduino versions the Leonardo board can natively register as a keyboard, making it a snap to programmatically map any key to the switches.

If you like this project you should check out [Dossier’s] foot mouse as well.

Playing Footsie With Your Video Games

July 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Jon] will be tapping away with his toes during gaming session thanks to this foot controller which is packed with buttons and sensors. It’s the second iteration of the build. The original had some solder joints break and the USB stopped working. He had also been experiencing some erratic behavior and so he decided to upgrade the control hardware and add a few more things in the process.

This version uses an Arduino Uno as the interface board. He did a bunch of prototyping to find the best way to hook up all the analog sensors, and how to properly debounce the buttons. Once he was happy with the inputs he set about finding a better way to use the USB HID standard with the device. We were surprised to hear that the ATmega16u2 (one of the new AVR chips which includes USB hardware) doesn’t play nicely with Linux. But [Jon] managed to hack his way around that issue and now he’s gaming with an even better foot controller than before.

Foot-controlled Mouse Keeps Your Hands On The Keyboard

March 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

A bit of mechanical ingenuity makes building this foot-controlled mouse into a fun project. It consists of a platform which hosts one pedal for each foot. The right foot controls the movement of the cursor, and the left is responsible for the buttons.

The guts of a wireless mouse do most of the electrical work for this hack. You can see that the optical sensor is mounted on the front of the right foot pedal. A ball bearing combined with a hinge provides motion on two axes. This moves the sensor past a piece of curved foam made by covering a ball with plastic wrap then spraying foam insulation around it. The pedal on the left has four buttons actuated by moving the toes down, up, left, or right. There’s a centering mechanism for this pedal which uses a rubber band

One thing we wonder about here is whether there is a need to lift and re-center the mouse/cursor? There is also no scroll wheel. But those issues are just waiting for someone to pick up the project and make their own improvements.