ToeTap Lets You Control Your Computer with Your Feet

Quick! Run over to your local zoo and spend a few minutes watching monkeys or apes. You should see them using their feet to interact with things almost as much as they use their hands. So why do we humans, with all our supposed evolutionary advancement, fail to utilize our feet? It is absurd and we could all double our productivity if we started taking advantage of our feet. Fortunately, there is now a way to do that thanks to ToeTap designed by Dimitris Platis.

ToeTap is a USB HID (human interface device) intended for foot control. It gives the user three “buttons” that they can easily trigger with their feet. Evolutionary jokes aside, this is a genuinely useful tool that can improve your productivity. Imagine, for instance, that you could simply shift your foot to activate a specific hot key shortcut instead of trying to contort your hand to reach the proper keys on your keyboard. Or you can control functions on your computer without using your hands at all—an ability that would help many content creators. Just tap a toe to advance to the next page of the script or to swap between camera views.

This design is very simple and therefore easy for people to assemble. It has a 3D-printed frame where the user can rest their feet. The electronics underneath that “foot rest” consist of three PCBs and a few basic components.

Platis designed the PCBs in a clever way in order to keep manufacturing costs down. Instead of one large PCB (which would be expensive), ToeTap has three smaller — but identical — PCBs. Those have castellated edges, so they are easy to solder together. Each one has an LDR (light-dependent resistor) acting as a “button.” When the user moves their foot over one, they block the light and that triggers a button press. The advantages of an LDR are the low cost, a lack of moving parts to improve reliability, and noiseless operation. That last factor is especially important for the aforementioned content creators.

Finally, a microcontroller monitors the LDRs and sends button press events over USB to the computer. That microcontroller is a Microchip ATmega32U4 on a “Mini SS Micro” development board, which is very small. The use of the ATmega32U4 is important, because it is configurable as a USB HID. As far as the computer knows, it is receiving input from a normal keyboard and that means that ToeTap will work with whatever software the user wants.