Virtual DDR Pad using Python

DDR pads are by no means cheap and I seem to have a proficiency for destroying them on a regular basis. I decided that I need an alternative, and have since started on a project to build a virtual DDR pad using a webcam and linear laser (much like a laser keyboard). I am currently using Python to code the program, however I am by no means a programmer and all of this is relatively new to me. As such, I have run into a bit of a problem and was wondering if anyone here would be able to help me out.

In order to create keyboard events, I am using PyAutoGUI and its keyUp/keyDown commands. These commands seem to work fine in any application except for Stepmania, where no key press is registered for whatever reason. The strange thing is that the commands mouseDown/mouseUp work perfectly fine and Stepmania recognizes them. So I was curious as to whether anyone has any insight as to what could be causing this issue, or if anyone has experienced something similar before.

Thanks :D

I started work on some code to actually correctly translate input from the EMS USB2 adapter for pads, which works fine with Stepmania 3.9x but does not with Stepmania 5 after alpha 4. While I still need to do tweaking to the code, I found you need to use your python script as a wrapper to launch Stepmania, after which it will accept the keyboard presses. For whatever reason Stepmania doesn't acknowledge the keypress events, even if they're "global".