 What do you do when you run out of space on your desk for Mac peripherals? Well, you put them on the floor, of course So in this video, I'm going to be talking about how to set up USB foot pedals with your Mac Hello, welcome to take one tech. My name is Alec now My desk is getting a little bit cluttered my loop deck just arrived yesterday And then I've still got my obviously stream deck my beloved stream deck The loop deck hasn't taken over that spot yet and then also my space pilot pro Yeah, the desk can sometimes get a little bit cluttered can't it? Let's have a little look There's my stream deck. There's my loop deck and there's my space mouse my mouse And then obviously we've also got the budget tech pointer the thing about all of these devices is I've only got two hands I can only possibly use Well maximum of ten things at any one time But unlikely that'll be pressing them all but in any case What do you do when you still need to perform some actions and you just haven't got enough fingers to do it? Or well, this is where these come in USB foot pedals Now this is a low-cost sort of generic foot pedal that you can get from Amazon. It's about $40. In fact, it's exactly $40 No, it's not it's 1 cent less. So let's have a look shall we here we go. It is there the Well, I won't even bother reading that but that's what they are anyway 39.99 on Amazon. I'm sure there are other deals. I've looked and there are quite a few different options actually for the same sort of stuff They're all basically the same from the same source manufacturer But then they're all just obviously branded differently, but they are just sort of non-branded as I mean just so that they're branded They are pretty much non-branded generic things the the build quality of them is not the best It's not gonna where it's certainly not up to sort of stream deck standards or anything like that But for what they are for basically something to put on the floor then It's more than adequate as far as I'm concerned So basically the way that this works is it is Basically just simulating keystrokes and I can in fact prove that if I just pop this one up here Then basically if I just come and click this I'm in a little notes app So if I just come here and press this one You see that's a This is B and this is C So that is the way that this is mapped at the moment and that's that's all very well if I want to type ABC all day But if I want them to do something else Then we're gonna have to do a little bit of work to get it to do what we want Incidentally what I do want it to do is I want to use it for controlling Ecamp live when I am presenting and things like that not for this channel where I'm usually just sat down with my stream deck in front of me But I do use Ecamp live for other things, you know and one of the things I use it for is For generating course material and presentations and things like that and for a lot of those instances I'm not actually sat at my desk believe it or not. I do stand up from time to time I have legs as well, even though you don't really see them So when I'm doing that though, I will often be using a little Logitech remote and you can map this to do anything else you want it to and in fact I left a Video or I will leave a video link in the top corner and in the description All about how you can remap this using keyboard maestro if you want to use it to control Ecamp live And that is the video editing software that I'm using not video editing software. Is it no no no It's not there's no edits here Ecamp live is the live production software that I use to make these videos on the fly with no edits in case you couldn't tell It's a Mac only application I did go down the OBS route originally, but I saw sense and I came round to Ecamp live It's such an intuitive application And it is a pleasure to use and if you head over to take one tech I o slash Ecamp you can get a free trial There you'll probably know this if you are a regular viewer of my channel But if you are not then you'll notice that probably about a third two-thirds rather of my content is all related to Ecamp So if you do give it a try and need any tutorials then just check out the rest of my channel for all of that as well It's a delightful program And I highly recommend it I use it every day actually not just for this channel But as I say for creating presentations I use the virtual camera to up level up my zoom game as well And for teams meetings and things like that. It really is a great bit of software So that is what I want to use these foot pedals for for when I am using my Logitech remote to control my presentations and things like that But then I also want to be able to do things like start Ecamp live a recording or pause or things like that So that is the reason that I got these foot pedals And I'm quite pleased with them so far to be honest because they do exactly what I wanted them to do I have to confess I was a little bit concerned when it arrived and it got this really strange object in it It's sort of like a shiny Coaster with a hole in the middle. I'm not quite sure. I have got a glass that will just about fit on it In fact, I've got my Ecamp live glass. There we go. It fits perfectly So I was a bit concerned. I don't know how many modern computers ship with CD drives these days So I did wonder if there was going to be any issue with it But I figured if it's USB and it's got some sort of input then it's basically just a keyboard, isn't it? Or be it a three key keyboard. So what we need to do though is actually do a little bit of work to get it Working the way we want because we do need to remap the keys on it because as I say, I don't want to be just typing a b and c so the Application that I am using to do that is an application called carabiner carabiner elements rather and I'll obviously leave Leave a link in the description. It is a free software It's open source software and as you can see it does actually work on Monterey So it's nice to see that it is up to date And so yeah, just download that and run that software and that basically looks something like this So here we are now in the software now I should just point out actually that when you do install it is going to ask you to give permissions in the system Preferences and this is one of those sneaky ones. It's not really sneaky, but it always catches me out So when you go into your security and preferences it is going to ask permission to go into your Privacy and then it will be one of the ones that is requesting Input monitoring because it is basically watching for keystrokes and things like that So that is why and what you'll notice is if I just type in my handy password. There we go It is it just appears here. So you've got carabiner grabber and carabiner observer So those are the two little things that you need to check But the extra one which sometimes catches me out, which is why I said it's sneaky It's not sneaky really, but sometimes what you'll find is in the general tab here. There'll be an extra Box here that you have to check just to give it permission at this level as well So you will need to do that It does prompt you to do it in the in the software But sometimes it's you can actually click past it and then if you haven't clicked in here Then it still won't work and you might be wondering why because you've gone into the privacy section I say you I'm talking about me. I do this quite regularly And in here you see well, I've checked it everywhere, but why isn't it working? And it's just this little extra one that you have to check in the general tab But in any case once you have installed it and by the way when you plug the foot switch in then what you'll see is that it will Just come up as a keyboard and it will do that thing where if you've ever plugged a USB keyboard into your Mac It tries to identify what type of keyboard it is and it will say press the you know The right shift key or the left shift key or something like that Just click past that because you'll never get it to recognize it because it's only got three keys on it So you can just click straight past that but when we come into carabiner here There's lots of different functions you can do in here And I'm not going to go and do a full rundown on this application itself Because it's it's it's more than we need for use case at the moment All we want to do is some simple modifications to basically remap those three keys so that they're no longer a bnc And so what we're going to do is we can see the target device here And you can add in different sort of mappings here And you can either apply them to all devices or you can apply them to specific devices Which is what we want now you can see here that I've got my Apple keyboard plugged in I've also got a my Logitech MX master and also a USB receiver for Logitech a Logitech mouse as well But then we've also got this mystery one here. No product name. No manufacturer name. Well, that is this one It is the generic one But you can see how it's kind of grayed out at the moment and that's because it is not enabled at the moment to be To allow us to make changes to the mappings for it But all we need to do is we need to just come over to the devices section here Click on devices and you'll see that we can just basically check a box to decide which ones we want to be sort of eligible I suppose for editing so what we're going to do is come up to this one. No product name and click on that and Now what what will happen is if we come back into the simple modifications? You can see that now we can actually select that one So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select that one and then I basically just need to modify the three keys Don't I so I'm just going to click on add item in fact, let's just get them all up there So these are the three keys if you remember I just checked the mappings of them and they happen to be a b and c So all I need to do now is I'm going to change from one key to another So I'm going to come here and I'm going to change this from a The next one was letter B And this is going off the screen. I realize let me scroll up so you can just see there we go There's a big long list here of all the potential keys So I'm going to come back up here and select where's it gone c So now I've got the a b and c from the foot pedals And what I want to do is change that and so I'm going to actually for you could use a number of ways Of I do this a number of ways actually you could use the built-in mapping in Mac OS But I'm actually going to use a keyboard maestro because they built in macking mapping in Mac OS Doesn't let you change it on an individual input device basis But then you could you just have this as going to a particular key So for example like in ecamm live for example the application that I'm going to be using it in You've got page up and page down is go to the next scene and the previous scene So I could just come down here and I could change these to the page up and page down keys That would be one way of doing it But what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually use keyboard maestro So I'm going to assign a key to these which am really isn't used at all at the moment On my Mac and that is these really high number function keys So they just go in fact, I haven't even got an F20 on my keyboard, but I can still Assign it here. So I'm going to press F20 In fact, let me let me do these in a logical order. Shall I I'm going to make the first one F18 I'm going to make the next one F 19 and then I'm going to make the last one F20 Like that. So now we have mapped those keys So now instead of those keys on the footswitch being abc They are now F18 F19 F20 So that is as much as we need to do for configuration of the foot pedals So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to keyboard maestro and What I've done in here is I've created a folder for my foot pedals And I'm basically going to add my three commands here Now I could actually create multiple commands and there would be ways that I could sort of switch between them But I'm going to keep things simple for the moment. So the first one I'm going to call a pedal one And I will know which one it is I'm going to go left to right So this one is pedal one. This one is pedal two And I'm calling in that rather than the actual functions just in case I do want to just reassign them at a later date So we've got pedal one pedal two pedal three Okay, so now I need to assign the triggers And so if I click on the new trigger, by the way, if you are unfamiliar with keyboard maestro I'll leave a link to the introduction to keyboard maestro that I did up in the the top corner This that we're going to do now is Kind of at a very basic level. So it should hopefully be easy to follow along with So I'm not going to do a full introduction to keyboard maestro itself But I can just quickly I suppose tell you The basics we've got some groups of macros here And then in each group you have this column here, which is the list of the macros within that group Which is why I've just grouped together all of the ones for my foot pedal Foot pedals rather and so this is the macros and then in this window here You have basically what's going to happen when the macro is triggered and you have two sections really You have any of the or rather you have the trigger section Which is where you set what happens to actually trigger the macro and then down here you have what happens once the macro is triggered So that's where you can have a whole chain of different events That happen with that trigger But we're basically going to do something really simple because we just want a single trigger Which is when we press one of the foot pedals and then we want it to perform an action So the triggers are quite simple to set up because all we have to do is come on to the new trigger and click on that And then there's lots of different types of triggers. I'm not going to go through them all but we want the first one Which is a hotkey. So basically when a key is pressed it's going to trigger the action So now we've got our hotkey and it's suggesting that we type it in here And you can see that the box is highlighted as well. Now all I actually have to do is press my foot pedal There we go I've just pressed my first foot pedal and it's come up with f 18 Which is good because it shows us the mappings that we did in carabiner are working So that is f 18 and now what we want to do is we want to actually perform an action So the actions that I'm going to use in this case is the I'm going to have play and or record and Stop for ecamm live. I'm also going to have a pause button And then I'm also going to have next scene as well So first of all, I'm going to click on new action for this one. And then what we want to do is It's obviously the last action that I'd used Let me just show you that again from the beginning because we've got all of these different actions that we can add in But what we want to do is basically Trigger a menu item in an app. Now you can do this with keyboard shortcuts So I could in theory just create a mapping for this key to be the keyboard shortcut for record in ecamm live The only issue with that though is that in that case Ecamm live would need to be the frontmost application and the active application Whereas this way I can actually just activate a menu item without ecamm being the front application And given that I would be using this whilst doing a presentation with my presentation remote Then keynote would actually more than likely be the frontmost application So what I want to do is I want to trigger a menu item now You can do a search in here for the actions. And so what I'm going to search for is menu Try that again Menu and you can see that we've got two options And it's this first one that we want select or show a menu item. So I'm going to pop that one in there And then what we can do is you can choose between whether you want it in the frontmost application But we want to choose a specific application. So I'm going to come down here and choose ecamm live It has to be the beta. That's what the one that I'm using And now what we can do is we can actually choose the menu item manually So if I come into here and then I come down the list and we can see the list of Applications and so we can see ecamm And then we can see recording And then we can see in fact, where is the I've just got to see I've never actually gone to it in the menu one One second. Let me find out exactly where the record button the record menu item is Let me have a little look Begin recording. Uh, it's in the ecamm live menu. I see so it's in the first one I've never actually triggered it from the menu. So I couldn't just remember where it was So if I go to ecamm live, uh, beta ecamm live beta and then you can see we've got this menu item begin recording So I've got to be careful now because if I press this one, it might actually just end this recording So now that is mapped. So when I press this foot pedal, it is going to begin the recording now Let me just double check and see That that will actually In fact, there is a separate keystroke for end recording and there's one for pause So for the time being let's just use those shall we so that is begin recording Then let's in that case make the middle one to be in fact what I can do here I can do a bit of a time saving here. I've been and created all of these These other two but what I should have done is just create one And then duplicate it. So now I can just duplicate that macro and duplicate this one So now pedal one is going to be for starting recording pedal two Is going to be pause and pedal three is going to be end recording So that's pedal two and the reason why I'm doing it like this is because now everything is all set up in here We've got it mapped to the um, the the right, uh application and everything like that as well So I'm just going to click in here to highlight the cell and then I'm going to press the middle button Like that and then what I'm going to do is come down here Now what you can actually do is if you do know the actual name of the the menu there the menu item So we've got one here. It's just pause recording. All I need to do is just type in here pause Do make sure you get that right if you don't then it won't actually trigger it So you might be better to just go through and do it like this But if you are confident in your spelling of Five letter words Then you can just write it because it's it's just telling you here the menu and the sub menu So this is the the sort of main menu and then this is the sub menu that the menu item appears in So we've got that now We've got pedal one and pedal two and then let's come to pedal three And then this one I'm just going to click in here and I'm going to press my foot pedal like that Whoops There we go and it's shown up f20 and then here what I'm going to do is just type in end And that is it now what I've got is I've got my foot pedals plugged in over usb and That's all there is to it. It literally is is that simple So what I'm going to do now is just come out of here because that didn't take actually as long as I was expecting And I didn't expect it to take a long time So that is that is done now. We've now got our macros programmed in keyboard maestro. They are programmed to my My foot pedals which are here and which now need to go down on the floor I can get rid of that overlay and Yeah, I can still use my stream deck obviously for this is my ecum profile By the way, I did a video all about my ecum live profile So if you want to check that out and if you like my icons, they're all available on my store So I'll leave a link to my store in the description as well But yeah, so I normally for this channel use use my stream deck to control Ecum but then I'm doing a lot of scene switching and stuff like that whereas often when I'm doing my presentations and things like that then I don't actually need as many as many controls for that so You can literally remap this to anything though. So that principle that I've just shown you there any application You've got where you think you might want to Control it with your feet If you're that way inclined then these are a great a great idea and yeah $40 it's it makes my life a little bit easier. So it's certainly worth the money for me But I'll leave a link obviously to them in the description as well Where you can get them on amazon and I hope you found that useful and if you did I'll leave a link to it Now you see this is what I'd I normally leave a link to some other related content But I don't have much related to foot switches funnily enough But I will say if you have enjoyed this video Then give it a like and subscribe and if you find my content useful Then the best way to support the channel is to head over to my buy me a coffee page at buy me a coffee Dot com slash take one tech and there you can make a one-off donation or become a member and get hidden benefits I'll tell you what the hidden benefits are they're not actually that hidden Me to press that twice the hidden benefits are if you join at the $10 a month level You actually get all of my digital downloads forever for free So that would be quite nice because then you could get your nice new stream deck icon pack And all the other ones that I make from here on in Included in that monthly membership cost. So that is what the That level of support gives you in case you were interested. So I've just figured out I know what I'll leave a link to I'll leave a link to some of my other gear reviews over on the right hand side and YouTube will pick a video just for you up in the top right. So until the next video. Have a great day