Teejusb's FSR Guide

A complete software package for FSR dance pads.
Join the for any questions/suggestions

Features

• React web UI to customize sensitivity
• Profiles & persistence
• Light support

Screenshots

Requirements

• A Teensy or Arduino
  • uses native keyboard library for Arduino and Joystick library for Teensy
• Python 3.8-3.12
  • virtualenv
• Node 12-16 (needs updating for 17+)
  • yarn

Hardware setup

Follow a guide like fsr-pad-guide or fsr to setup your Arduino/Teensy with FSRs.

Firmware setup

1. Install Arduino IDE (skip this if you're using OSX as it's included in Teensyduino)
2. Install Teensyduino and get it connected to your Teensy and able to push firmware via Arduino IDE
3. In Arduino IDE, set the Tools > USB Type to Serial + Keyboard + Mouse + Joystick (or Serial + Keyboard + Mouse)
4. In Arduino IDE, set the Tools > Board to your microcontroller (e.g. Teensy 4.0)
5. In Arduino IDE, set the Tools > Port to select the serial port for the plugged in microcontroller (e.g. COM5 or /dev/something)
6. Load fsr.ino in Arduino IDE.
7. By default, A0-A3 are the pins used for the FSR sensors in this software. If you aren't using these pins alter the SensorState array
8. Push the code to the board

Testing and using the serial monitor

1. Open Tools > Serial Monitor to open the Serial Monitor
2. Within the serial monitor, enter t to show current thresholds.
3. You can change a sensor threshold by entering numbers, where the first number is the sensor (0-indexed) followed by the threshold value. For example, 3 180 would set the 4th sensor to a threshold of 180. You can change these more easily in the UI later.
4. Enter v to get the current sensor values.
5. Putting pressure on an FSR, you should notice the values change if you enter v again while maintaining pressure.

UI setup

1. Install Python. On Linux you can install Python with your distribution's package manager. On some systems you might have to additionally install the python3 header files (usually called python3-dev or similar).
2. Install Node
   • Install yarn. A quick way to do this is with NPM: npm install -g yarn
3. Within server.py, edit the SERIAL_PORT constant to match the serial port shown in the Arduino IDE (e.g. it might look like "/dev/ttyACM0" or "COM1")
   • You also may need to modify the sensor_numbers variable.
4. Open a command prompt (or terminal) and navigate to ./webui/server with cd webui/server
5. Run python -m venv venv (you may need to replace python with py on Windows or potentially python3 on Linux)
6. Run venv\Scripts\activate (on Linux you run source venv/bin/activate)
7. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies (might need to use pip3 instead of pip on Linux)
8. Then move to the ./webui directory by doing cd ..
9. Run yarn install && yarn build && yarn start-api
   • On Linux, you'll also need to edit the start-api script in ./webui/package.json to reference venv/bin/python instead of venv/Scripts/python

The UI should be up and running on http://localhost:5000 and you can use your device IP and the port to reach it from your phone (e.g. http://192.168.0.xxx:5000 )

Troubleshooting

• If you use localhost in your browser and if the UI looks choppy, try using your local IP instead
• If you see the following error, ensure the "Serial Monitor" isn't already open in Arduino IDE serial.serialutil.SerialException: [Errno 16] could not open port /dev/cu.usbmodem83828101: [Errno 16] Resource busy: '/dev/cu.usbmodem83828101
• If you notice that your input is delayed and perhaps that delay increases over time, you can sometimes rectify that by restarting the server. Close your start-api window and run it again.

Tips

Make a desktop shortcut (Windows)

Create a new text file called start_fsrs.bat and place it on your desktop.

start "" http://YOUR_PC_NAME_OR_IP:5000/
cd C:\Users\YourUser\path\to\fsr\webui
yarn start-api

Now you can just click on that file to open the UI and start the server.

Joystick Support on Arduino Leonardo and Pro Micro

The FSR firmware will configure Teensy devices as USB joysticks, and other Arduino devices as USB keyboards. Some Arduino boards such as the Arduino Leonardo and Sparkfun's Pro Micro can be configured as Joysticks using an additional third-party library.

Install ArduinoJoystickLibrary, by following the installation instructions in that project's readme. https://github.com/MHeironimus/ArduinoJoystickLibrary#installation-instructions

1. Download https://github.com/MHeironimus/ArduinoJoystickLibrary/archive/master.zip
2. In the Arduino IDE, select Sketch > Include Library > Add .ZIP Library.... Browse to where the downloaded ZIP file is located and click Open.

Find this line, and remove the slashes at the beginning to uncomment it.

// #define USE_ARDUINO_JOYSTICK_LIBRARY

#define USE_ARDUINO_JOYSTICK_LIBRARY

Support for RP2040

The RP2040 is the microcontroller used by the Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pi Pico only exposes 3 analog input pins, but the RP2040 actually has 4. Various other RP2040 development boards do make it easy to access all 4 analog pins, which is more suitable for building a 4-panel dance pad.

To run the FSR firmware on an RP2040-based device, install "Raspberry Pi Pico/RP2040" 3.6.1 or newer in the Arduino IDE boards manager. Make sure the "USB Stack" option in the Tools menu is set to "Pico SDK."