Microphone open/mute control with repurposed racing pedals

Ribeiro de Azeredo, like many of us, has been working from home as of late. Also like many of us, he has a child around the house, which isn’t always conducive to online meetings. To help with this, he built a foot-based microphone switcher using the pedals off of an old racing controller.

Pedal inputs are simply a pair of variable resistors, so he created a voltage divider for each one, reading the resulting analog output with an Arduino Nano.

Data is then passed along to his Linux computer, which mutes or opens the mic on (foot) command. Additionally, he set up an onscreen mic status indicator using Polybar, ensuring that his audio doesn’t get unintentionally sent out!