dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

Hi @droundy , yes I put a hook to listen for keyboard events. I'm using Kaldi backend, so I put this at the bottom of my existing _dictation_mode.pyfile (that you can see at "https://github.com/Danesprite/dictation-mode-grammar/blob/master/_dictation_mode.py"):

import threading

# A thread function callback that is blocking
def threadfunc_setupHotkeysForDictationModes_blocking(arg):
    from pynput import keyboard
    print("Waiting in the background for global hotkeys that switch dictation modes ...")
    # This function is unused because we use on_press & on_release directly. But it's left here for compilation purposes
    def on_activate():
        print('Global dictation-mode hotkey activated!')

    def key_pressed(a):
        #print('key pressed!', a)
        # If the user is holding down the NumLock key, switch to Dictation mode.
        if a == keyboard.Key.num_lock:
            print('Global dictation-mode hotkey pressed!', a)
            grammar.status = 2      # Dictation-only mode

    def key_released(a):
        #print('key released!', a)
        # If the user released the NumLock key, switch back to Command mode.
        if a == keyboard.Key.num_lock:
            print('Global dictation-mode hotkey released!', a)
            grammar.status = 0      # Command-only mode

    with keyboard.Listener(
            on_press=key_pressed,
            on_release=key_released) as h:
        h.join()

# Setup event handlers for a few global hot keys, so the user can easily switch between Dictation vs Command mode.
# This function is non-blocking
def setupHotkeysForDictationModes():
    mythread = threading.Thread(target = threadfunc_setupHotkeysForDictationModes_blocking, args = (0,))
    mythread.daemon = True     # Don't block the parent thread from terminating when desired.
    mythread.start()

# Allow switching dictation mode
setupHotkeysForDictationModes()

This script creates a background thread to always listen for the numlock key going up or down. It's not "polling", most of the time this thread will be asleep, the pynput library wakes up this thread whenever any key is pressed on any "keyboard" attached to your computer (including USB foot pedals!). I then configured one of my footswitch pedals to be a NumLock key. eg:

sudo ./footswitch -1 -k numlock -2 -k F24 -3 -k scrollock                     # Pedal 1 = NumLock, Pedal 2 = media_play_pause/F24, Pedal 3 = ScrollLock