iPad Foot Pedal Sheet Music Page Turner

Joonas Pihlajamaa (AKA Code and Life) has used an iPad Pro for some time to display sheet music when playing the piano. Although this is certainly better than carrying around reams of paper, actually swiping to the next page can be quite annoying. Fortunately, there are options to tun the page using a foot pedal, but they can set you back somewhere in the $100 range. As an inexpensive wireless solution, he instead turned to a $4 ESP32 module and a $2 pedal switch to make his own foot-activated iPad page advancement device.

With the pedal and ESP32 in hand, actually getting thing working was fairly simple. The pedal’s output cable is cut in two, revealing wires that can pass inputs directly on to the ESP32 board through a single input pin. When the user pushes down on the pedal for 50-500ms it advances the page via a virtual right arrow key input, while longer pedal pushes flip the music back one page using the left arrow key.

Wireless connectivity is handled by the ESP32’s Bluetooth capabilities and the ESP32-BLE-Keyboard library. While page turning on an iPad is certainly useful, this simple idea could be applied to a number of situations, perhaps for a simple gaming augmentation or quick hands-free macro trigger.