Wireless Kindle Footswitch

Reading on ePaper is generally a pleasant experience, but what about if you want to use it to store sheet music? This may be a convenient…

Jeremy Cook
5 years ago

Reading on ePaper display is generally a pleasant experience, but what about if you want to use it to store sheet music? This may be a convenient storage method, but when playing music takes up both hands, it’s a bit inconvenient to reach over and swipe the screen. To help his musician brother out with this conundrum, hacker “mosivers” came up with a wireless foot pedal for turning pages.

He first attempted to spoof a capacitive input on the Kindle’s touchscreen, but after some initial success, he found this method to be impractical, and decided to instead go the Wi-Fi route. This involved first jailbreaking the Kindle, then installing several pieces of software and creating a page flip script to be executed remotely.

After all of that preparatory work, it was time to build the physical unit. It uses a NodeMCU ESP8266 dev board to generate a web server, which allows for linking between the two devices without any intermediate Wi-Fi connection. The programmed board was then secured in an enclosure in order to hold up repeated toe taps, with a pair of buttons used for changing the page.

While this hack is meant for musicians, mosivers notes that it could also be useful for those with disabilities, or even for those who simply find hand swiping inconvenient.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles