If you know just a little bit of electronics, for something like a pedal it might be more straight forward to take it apart, wire up the pedal switch directly t

If you know just a little bit of electronics, for something like a pedal it might be more straight forward to take it apart, wire up the pedal switch directly to rpi pico and run something like QMK or any other usb keyboard firmware on it. That way avoiding the complexity of pedal->usb->pi pico->usb->computer. Full USB hid stack and supporting arbitrary HID device as input can be ridiculously complex. And since you are skipping the redundant USB step, you can also use dumb non USB pedals. There are plenty of options available meant for sewing machines, midi keyboards and industrial equipment. Just need to watch out as some of them contain a potentiometer for modulating the output instead of on/off switch. That may or may not be what you want. It should still be possible to emulate regular switches with them, but it will require a bit more coding. This is more suited for moderate complexity HID devices where direct rewiring is less practical due to amount of inputs (keyboard) or size constraints+non trivial undocumented sensors(mice, barcode scanner, other specialized input devices), or don't want to take it apart.