Simplest and Cheapest Foot-Controlled Telepromter Ever

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Simplest and Cheapest Foot-Controlled Telepromter Ever

Author
Giorgos Lazaridis
March 12, 2014

PAGE 2 of 2

Making the Housing

Ok, i hacked this piece with plenty of pleasure and joy and ripped the guts out of it with a grim. I want its suit for my hack, its soul belongs to the trash can


Capitalism: You buy a whole power supply only to use its shell for another project...	The keyboard USB won't fit. Bummer	No problem. Cut it, I will	I also cut some plastic things from the box. Its now ready!

Lets put everything together now:


Yes, hotmelt, what else??? Its the marvel of our times for the DIYers	The PCB now perfectly fits inside after some...trimming	UHU stick around the lids to glue the top of the housing together. Hey, i don't plan to open that again


Hotmelt again to secure the USB wire	And that's it!	The RJ connector is ready to receive the foot pedal!

Does it work?

Oh yes it does, right out of the box :D :D :D


My Ubuntu PC says it works. I step on the foot pedal (at the bottom) and a get a space!	That foot pedal...

The Software

I'm not very good at searching, oh damn i'm not. But i did search well, and i tested some of the not-so-many free teleprompter programs out there, non of which fit my demands. I wanted reasonable speed with control and large letters, as well as a single start-pause button to actuate with the space. The problem that i faced most of the times is that the speed control was bad. With large letters (font size 100 and more) the speed was very very slow.

In such cases and since this program is extremely simple, i decided to make one for my windows XP laptop that will be the voice recorder and teleprompter as well.

The program is still buggy

and i might never release another version as long as it does my job. Now if i get too many requests for a debugged version or for more features... maybe... one known bug is that large texts may cause an overflow. This will happen if the height of the text to be scrolled (which depends on the length of the text and the font size) is larger than a 32767 pixels image.

Anyway, the software operation is very simple. Click Load and select text file to show. The first slider is for the speed and the second for the font size. Start Stop Rev for Start Stop and Reverse. The toggle button is the one that does the job. So when i load the text, i click the toggle twice to set focus. Then i can start/stop the scroll by clicking the Space on the keyboard or... by stepping on the foot switch! Voila!

Download file
Teleprompter Software (Windows XP executable). May work on other Windows versions.

Note that:
1. The program may have more bugs
2. AVG and Zone Alarm say that i do not have a virus, what do you say?
3. The file main.ini must be in the same catalog as the autocue.exe