Chauvet Stage Designer 16 Foot Pedal USB Macro Pad

This is a simple project to create an adapter that turns a Chauvet Stage Designer 16 foot pedal into a USB macro foot switch.

The foot pedal is a very simple device. It has four spring-loaded pedals over a PCB with four momentary switches. The PCB connects to a standard male DB-9 D-SUB connector. It uses pin 5 as a common line for the switches, and pins 1-4 as the signal pins for the switches.

A DB-9 "motherboard" connector can be used as a simple adapter, because it breaks out the DB-9 pins to a standard 2x5 pin IDC header; which can be easily connected to a microcontroller.

This project uses the Adafruit Feather M0 Express microcontroller because it has USB HID support, intigrated pullup resisters, and a nice proto perf board area to mount a 2x5 socket for the DB-9 adapter.

Pinout Diagram

  DB-9 Male          IDC Header
                        ┌─┐
┌───────────┐      ┌────┴─┴─ ──┐
│ 1 2 3 4 5 │ ───► │ 1 2 5 8 9 │
│  6 7 8 9  │      │ 3 6 4 7 X │
└───────────┘      └───────────┘

  Connection        DB-9   Pin
  ────────────────────────────
  Ground            5      GND
  P1 (FULL ON)      4      A1
  P2 (STAND BY)     3      A2
  P3 (PATTERN UP)   2      A3
  P4 (STEP UP)      1      A4

References

• Feather Specification
• Feather M0 Express Reference
• Feather M0 Express CAD Model
• CircuitPython Getting Started Guide
• Adafruit HID Library Documentation
• circup

Attributions

• Enclosure design is based on Heartman's OpenScad Parametric Box [CC BY-NC 3.0 License]