AnalogPedals

Turn the Hall-effect analog keys of an AULA WIN68 HE keyboard into a virtual Xbox 360 controller. One key is your accelerator (Right Trigger), another is your brake (Left Trigger), a pair steers the left stick — and the gamepad feels how far the key is actually pressed: 0.01 mm resolution, ~340 samples of travel, at full keyboard scan rate.

Tested end-to-end on Windows 11 with ViGEmBus: full presses → RT/LT = 255, half presses → ~120, release → 0.

Screenshot

Features

• Any key → any control: two triggers, both sticks (four-axis pairs), face buttons, bumpers, Back/Start — bind by clicking Bind and pressing the physical key to full travel; it binds when the key returns to rest.
• Real analog output, not on/off: trigger value is proportional to travel; sticks interleave smoothly both axes per frame.
• Response curves: gamma per group (out = fraction^gamma) for pedals and each stick axis, live curve preview; dead zone, full travel and the button-actuation threshold as live sliders.
• OS-level key blocking of mapped keys (optional) with a passive key-name auto-learner (HID edge × keyboard hook cross-match).
• Tkinter UI with live telemetry (pedal cylinders, stick radars, curve plots), profile system with export/import, and a command-line mode for headless use.
• Clean exit: triggers zeroed and board streaming switched off — your keyboard returns to normal keyboard duties.

Requirements

OS	Windows 10/11 (X64)
Python	3.11+ (3.12 tested)
Keyboard	AULA WIN 68 HE (VID 2E3C PID C365), wired USB
Driver	ViGEmBus — virtual Xbox 360 emulation
Python packages	pip install -r requirements.txt (hidapi, vgamepad)

Adapt to other boards: the vendor protocol was confirmed on the WIN 68 HE; it shares its family with other Aula HE boards (see Aether-HE's board registry for VID/PID pairs of related models).

Install

1. ViGEmBus driver — install from nefarius/ViGEmBus releases (the standard virtual-controller driver). Verify with driverquery | findstr ViGEm.

2. Python deps —

   python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Plug the WIN 68 HE in via USB cable (2.4 GHz mode does not expose the vendor interface).

Run

UI:

python pedals_ui.py

Headless CLI (a console that binds to the default profile):

python analogpedals.py

Handy dev utilities:

• capture.py N — log raw analog frames for N seconds (identify a key by index)
• probe2.py — quick connectivity probe
• xinput_test.py — watch the virtual pad's triggers/sticks in real time

How it works

1. The WIN 68 HE exposes three USB HID interfaces. MI_02 (VID 2E3C PID C365, usage page 0xFF1B, usage 0x91, Report ID 0x01, 63-byte payloads) is the vendor interface the official AULA web driver talks to — input + output only, no feature reports.
2. AnalogPedals opens that interface and sends the actuation/trigger_test command to stream all keys: body 21 00 00 00 18 02 <22-byte key mask→0xFF>.
3. A frame streams whenever a covered key's travel changes: body[0]=0x21 (cmd 33), body[5]==1, row = body[6], col = body[7], index = row*22 + col, travel = body[8] | body[9] << 8 in 0.01 mm units (full travel ≈ 3.4–3.7 on this unit). A heartbeat (cmd 1) keeps the link alive every 2 s.
4. Travel is linearly mapped to the XInput trigger bytes of a virtual Xbox 360 pad created through ViGEmBus (via vgamepad), with a configurable dead zone, full-travel point, and per-axis gamma curves.

aula_protocol.py is a clean-room reimplementation shipped as part of AnalogPedals; the byte layout it commands was reverse-engineered together with the hardware-verified knowledge published by the Aether-HE drivers (attribution below — no upstream source is included).

Project layout

File	Purpose
analogpedals.py	Core + CLI: HID reader thread, mapping engine, virtual pad, blocking, auto-learn, config/presets
pedals_ui.py	Tkinter GUI: bind-by-press, live gauges, curve sliders, profiles, export
aula_protocol.py	Minimal vendor-HID protocol builders (open-stream, heartbeat, closing frames)
pedals.ini	Binding table, dead zone, full travel, curve gammas (auto-created/updated)
launch_ui.bat	One-click launcher for the UI on Windows

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Disclaimer. Not affiliated with or endorsed by AULA, Microsoft, ViGEm, or Nefarius. Use at your own risk; the protocol is undocumented and was reverse-engineered, so behaviour may change with keyboard/firmware updates.

Acknowledgements

• Aether-HE — their hardware-verified protocol research for the Aula Win60/WIN 68 HE board family was the roadmap for the vendor HID interface used here; byte layouts cited in this README were learned from that work and re-verified on a physical WIN 68 HE. No source code from Aether-HE is included.
• ViGEmBus / Nefarius — the virtual Xbox 360 controller driver this project rides on.
• vgamepad — the Python client library for ViGEm.