Bluetooth Page Clicker

[Renate]

For piano playing, this is a nice format: https://shop.boox.com/products/boox-blue-page-pedal
I don't own one and nobody has yet reported exactly what keystrokes it sends. It's not clear what/how many modes there are. There does not seem to be any documentation online. The boox.com website has it, but it directs you to the US website which doesn't have it.
[1st photo]

There is also the iRig stuff, with two or four buttons.
https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigblueboard/
https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigblueturn/
They say that now the two buttons supports native PgUp/PgDn compatible with Android. The four button used to (and apparently still) only supports Apple and used an interface app.
I kind of like the format of the four button and wrote my own Android app for it. That was a bit of a pain because you had to start that app. So I ripped out the circuit board and made my own that natively sent keystrokes without needing a helper app.
[2nd photo]

There are also many "guitar style" footboards but they also use those metal stud switches.

If you want to use wired USB the Infinity is a good quality, three pedal stenographer unit. You'd need a helper app to make it spit out keys.

Finally, with Onyx there is the whole quagmire of the long press and whether things react on the press or the release. I hacked stuff to defeat that so that action occurs on the downstroke.

[stumped]

Thanks.i small try a double footswitch Bluetooth device. Will report back once Amazon deliver one.
Meanwhile, I am propping up a pc keyboard below the monitor so that I can lunge for the Pg down, Pg up keys as needed.

I guess that people use calibre tags as the main way to group and organise sheet music books or single song pdfs.
Have yet to decide how best to use the author field when I have collected multiple arrangements or parts of the same song

[Renate]

You can always gut an old crappy keyboard, then find which two wires (row/column) to short to send a PgUp or PgDn. You can get some plywood/cardboard/whatever and with some switches make your own foot pedal.

If you get something, please report what codes it does/can generate and whether it generates down/up on a press and nothing on release or whether it generates a down on press and and up on release. You can check that all out using UsbMode.apk (in my sig).

[stumped]

thats exactly where i was coming from initially. all i need is a keyboard with all but 2 keys removed and those enlarged/

but then i remembered making my own foot switches back in the day for guitar amp and keyboards, and by the time you source 2 robust stomp switches + figure out how to make a box to mount them in, and buy the plugs and cables... you are close to the cost of a perbuilt one.

so i shall try the LEKATO bluetooth one from amazon , I already have that make of wireless elec guitar gadget pair. in theory i can use it with windows PC and android tablet with the same content, as both do bluetooth

i may start a new thread for - how to organise sheet music/ books / images etc in calibre, accepting that any supporting audio/ video educational materials are best stored elsewhere

[DiapDealer]

If you're familiar at all with Arduino/ESP-32 programming and can do a little soldering:

https://codeandlife.com/2021/05/23/d...al-with-esp32/

[stumped]

Updates. The Bluetooth purchase worked, but I had not thought it thru fully... It has to be paired every time I change the linked device. Makes sense asotherwise you broadcast a page turn instruction to all wake devices in range...
So I am ?looking it data entry pads which come in wired, wireless,Bluetooth flavours. All have page turn buttons with NUM lock toggled off . And it's a small rectangle which could be placed somewhere close.

A other overlooked factor is that most pianists have their best foot assigned to the sustain pedal, so the spare foot probably has to hop from next to previous buttons as needed. A repeat section in a song book can have u back flipping 2 pages, several times

I want a solution that works for guitars and keyboards, so I may keep the one foot switch for guitar and experiment with wired data entry blocks on keyboards I already have 24 inch pc monitor balanced on the Casio provided piano music holder bracket, , so adding a tappable key pad to top middle of case may work...

[Renate]

Originally Posted by stumped

It has to be paired every time I change the linked device.

Yeah, but the easiest way is just to keep a peripheral associated with one device. Either that or turn off Bluetooth on devices that you're not using. Most peripherals can remember pairing to four devices or so.

Semi-unrelated: I thought that the format of this device is nice if it had sold for $30. Unfortunately, it's for disabled, presumed to be paid for by insurance and is $200! https://www.medicaleshop.com/ablenet...th-switch.html

Then there is "Chubby Buttons" https://www.amazon.com/Chubby-Button.../dp/B07FBQ3PCF

[stumped]

waiting for my data entry pad gizmo to arrive, but from the amazon site pictures, they all have the nine digit key block which also doubles as left, right arrow, page up, page own keys via the num lock toggle
its probably easy to make a mask or plinth that covers all but the 2 needed keys for your page turn app, and maybe not to difficult to also rig a mechanism of stomping on those two buttons as a DIY footswitch ?

the wired pad i ordered is one fifth the price of a proper bluetooth foot switch [ so I could afford two if I like it ], and a bluetooth enabled version is also way cheaper than a dedicated page turner [the wireless, non-bluetooth ones have a dedicated usb mini receiver then you need to find a port for ]

[Renate]

I wouldn't use any plug-in receiver. You've got all the disadvantages of wired without the simplicity/cheapness. Moreover modern BLE (not the classic) is incredibly good on batteries.

Besides a number of clickers that I no longer use, I have a custom built keyfob for my readers, a single foot pedal for in my backpack and the 4 button formerly BlueBoard (now YellowBoard) and the Infinity wired triple for my desktop.

[stumped]

related issue:
ideally i want to double click a sheet music pdf in calibre main window (win 10) and have it open in full screen mode, but I can't find any windows hack to enable that

otherwise I have to keep a keyboard to hand, simply to press the very awkward CTRL+L ( for acrobat) or the slightly easier F11 for pdf xchange, to go full screen on an opened document

if I could bypass that, then so long as I have calibre open, all i need is a mouse and a page turner to bring up full screen music on the monitor on the music stand. ( There is full screen option available from adobe menus via mouse but that means a lot more mouse manipulation to access the menu )

FYI I was watching one piano guy doing his stuff on you tube, on a electric piano - in different videos he tries , for his music : using a laptop, using an ipad, or using lots of joined together pieces of paper on his music stand
the ipad is not quite big enough though, unless you can afford the largest most expensive model to get slose to A4 sized display. i have settled on 24 in ch montior which has a screen size comparable to an open book of 2 x a4 pages

[Renate]

Oh! I never noticed Adobe Acrobat ^L mode!
Going to full page mode is not that onerous as you only need to do it once per session.
OTOH, you still have to Alt-Tab to get back to Calibre to select a new piece of music, right?

Windows is kind of a pain. I've just made a new Bluetooth device for switching apps in Android. I can have a dedicated key for each app. This is not like Alt-Tab go to the next or previous app. Although in your case, a simple Alt-Tab would be good to go back from PDF reader to Calibre. But if you hit it twice you've gone back too far.

I've got it easier because guitar transcriptions are simpler and I've got it all integrated in one application. I just hit one of the four foot buttons and it goes to the next piece of music in the list, without even flashing the list.

Edit: I looked at this Adobe PDF stuff. Ctrl-L works fine, but it's not idempotent, i.e. you keep doing that it goes back and forth. I had an old utility that I wrote and it still appears to work just fine, but as I said, it will turn full-screen back to normal too.

C:\>wndctrl "*Adobe Acrobat*" /kctrl-l

[stumped]

"I've got it all integrated in one application. I just hit one of the four foot buttons and it goes to the next piece of music in the list, without even flashing the list."
This is what I d like. NB the ESC key will exit full screen. So I can see the calibre window for next selection. I am now using pdf xchange which uses f11 to go full screen.
But ideally I would cue up several sheets for a practice session, like a playlist, and be able to next page all the way through. That means a temp file of appended pdf I guess. There are on line utilities that create those but I have not found a free local app.
Google finds appendpdf, nut it's not a freebie.
It gets harder if you want to use backing tracks. I can play along to originals using Alexa plus Spotify to start and stop, but that does not work for a backing track ripped from a book plus cd, as the backing music is not on Spotify zervers

[stumped]

PS to elaborate.
Ideal solution is that I select multiple individual (pdf) tunes from calibre window using ctrl + click
Those get concatenated under the hood, and open as a single temporary pdf..which I then use the page turner solution with..

Is this doable via a plug in or better tackled outside of calibre?

[Renate]

Concatenating PDFs would work, but it's not very open-ended. I set my list to random (shuffle) and just play as many as I want. The next day I continue from where I left off.

But I'm still using a system where I have 2 controls for next/previous song and 2 controls for scrolling (I don't use pagination). But I'm playing 3 minute songs, presumably you're playing longer things. You definitely need foot pedals for page turning, but music piece selection could be by some sort of hand controls. In the simplest case it would just switch to Calibre, hit down arrow, hit enter. Although this gets into problems with Windows not letting you select the foreground window unless you are the foreground window.

Or you could load all the music into Acrobat and then switch tabs.

You could write a utility to control Acrobat with DDE. You'd feed the utility a list of filenames. A control would load the next one in.

Does Calibre do custom ad-hoc lists?

Sorry to be so disjointed. The underlying principle is that external controls can be of two types: 1) a system input device, like another keyboard, which is administered by the OS and can only talk to the foreground window and doesn't even know which one that is 2) something that the OS doesn't care about, a serial port, a lineprinter port, Bluetooth GATT that can speak privately to a background utility that can do things.

1) is easy and doesn't require a background utility but it will happily do PgDn to anything.
2) gives you more control but requires a helper utility.
You can mix and match the two approaches.

[stumped]

i am getting closer to a workable solution ( for a number pad entry gizmo)
i discover tht PDFxchange will open files into to multiple tabs within one instance
then CTRL-TAB is its shortcut for next tab. With powertoys I can assign that to an unused key on the data pad e.g. to / , and assign F11 for full screen to key *

so my wired pad ( when it arrives ) should give me all of next, previous page, full page toggle, and next tab...

also experimenting with exporting all my music pdf via calibre's save to disc so that all music is in a single flat folder, where its easy to open multiple files in windows

i am a bit stuck behind windows inability to show useful " covers" for pdf files, like caibre can.

i mostly play short things, but I am also using some thick books e.g. fake books, where its easier to export the page(s) i want with print to pdf rather than have to get to page 283 or whatever.... and not have to remember which fake book has the best version of which song...

i could then merge the fake book leadsheets I actually like into one slim volume I guess, discarding several hundred pages that are not of interest.

i read somewhere that another approach is to make version of song file with extra duplicate pages inserted for musical repeats, so that you never need to go backwards. nice idea, tedious to have to implement... and many repeats do not go back to a start of page position

[ about 20 years ago I bought a big indexed set of fake book pdfs from someone on ebay - i still have them, though several are poor quality for legibility from a distance. . The new real book series are the best typeset / most legible ]

i also recently bought a couple of steely dan transcriptions ( all keyboard, voice, & guitar parts) from a web site playlikethegreats.com. those are excellent, but delivered as a set of PDFs one for each instrument. he only had those 2 songs by SD though . & I found some accurate bass [notation] transcriptions for other Steely Dan on specialist bass guitar sites