 All right, every single week, the great search brought to you by Digikey and Lady Adish, use all her powers of engineering to show you how to search for things on digikey.com. Okay, and don't forget if in this year of part shortages, if there's a part you're looking for an alternative, let me know, I'll help you out, find an alternative component. But this week, I was working on this rotary encoder brick at board, and this is kind of a standard Bourne's PEC 11 rotary encoder with a little switch in it. And I wanted to make a version of this board that was not a rotary encoder, but a potentiometer. So rotary encoder, it goes all the way around, round, round, round, but you don't know where you are, right? All you know is whether you've gone forward or backward to one. You have to kind of count the clicks. Whereas a potentiometer, it doesn't go all the way around. It only goes, let me see if I can move this. Potentiometer doesn't go all the way around. It goes minimum. Maximum. So you can't go around more than, I think, usually 270 or 300 degrees, almost a full circle, but not quite. You do know where you are, which is kind of nice. Like you know exactly what position you're at. They're nice and smooth, but you don't get that full rotation. So, yeah, there's times when you want a rotary encoder for full rotation. And there's times when you want a potentiometer because you want to know what position you are, like 50%, 25%, 75% from a maximum. So the rotary encoder bodies that we're used to are these square bodies. There's a switch and then the three pins. We're not gonna find something that's probably the same. They're very similar looking, but they're not quite the same size body. And that's okay. There are standard size bodies for rotary encoders or about 12 millimeters, you know, 12.5 millimeters. And for potentiometers, they're, you know, about nine millimeters, 10 millimeters square body. And that's just sort of a standard-ish size. That said, I do watch out potentiometers do vary quite a bit from type to type. There's almost more variation, I find, in potentiometer sizes than rotary encoders. A lot of people really, they make rotary encoders, they make them in this standard size. The length of the knob may change, whether it's a panel mount or not, but the overall shape and pinout is the same. Potentiometers, I've found quite a bit of variation. So let's take a look. We want a low-cost, linear 10K resistor without a detent in the center. Get a very bog standard potentiometer that will PCB solder into our breakout, like so, and gives a nice strong mechanical connection, especially having these side nubs. Okay. All right, you want a good night computer? Yeah, I was going to my computer. So let's go to, did you key? Oh, while we're at it, I was, you know, one of the things I was looking at when I was searching on DigiKey is, if you look for potentiometer, you'll see potentiometers and rheostats. And like, you might be wondering like, what's a rheostat? I was like, yeah, what is a rheostat? A rheostat is a adjustable value resistor, which is different than a potentiometer. Potentiometer has the top and the bottom and then the middle goes between the two. So you do have a variable resistor, right? But it's only like, you've got two variable resistors, the bottom half and the top half, whereas a rheostat is only two pins and as you turn it, the resistance changes. So not good for voltage divider, but much, but good for changing how much current is going through something or the bias load or whatever of your device. So in our case, we're looking for a potentiometer, but they do often get categorized with rheostats, but rheostat, two pin potentiometer, three pin, we want three pin. So I'll say that there's a couple other options. There's some wheel potentiometer, trimmer potentiometer. Trim potentiometer is tricky because it's like when, which ones you want and when. So trimmer pots are almost always the surface amount component. They can be through a hole, but they tend to be surface amount or through a hole and they're small and you use a screwdriver to adjust the value. They're the same idea, but there isn't like a knob that you twist usually. Usually it's like a little, you can see here like a screwdriver end. Use your screwdriver and you use to twist it. So they're called trimmers because they are used to trim a value, right? You want to adjust a voltage and it's, you want to tweak it a little bit because there's variations. The trimmer will let you tweak it and then you set it and forget it. You don't have, it's not something that users are constantly messing with. And so for, there are some cases which will want trimmers. Maybe one day we'll go into a trimmer potentiometer video, but for now we're not looking for a trimmer. We want something with a knob. So that's the difference. There's the slide potentiometers again. You know, that's the kind I showed earlier in this video. It's, you slide it up and down. We're not looking for that. We're looking for a rotary. Okay. So what's interesting to me is actually there aren't as many potentiometers as I thought. There's only 10,000 different potentiometers. We did a lot, but like not as many as I would have imagined considering how often they're used. I think there's like a lot of like standards. So let's go with active potentiometers and then let's go with normally stocking. Now usually I would pick in stock but because there's so many part shortages I'm going to go with normally stocking and then we'll see what comes up and if necessary we'll order a variation on it. So for resistance ohms, so there's a lot of resistance values available for potentiometers, but I'm gonna select 10K. And here's the thing. I doesn't actually matter for my use case what the resistance is because I'm doing a voltage divider. So it could be anywhere from 1K to 100K. However, any potentiometer that's made is going to be available in 10K. It's just such a standard value that what I wanna do is find like the series, the family potentiometers, I'll search for 10K. And then if it happens to be out of stock I can always get the 5K or 100 or whatever but 10K is like the standard, gold standard potentiometer values. So let's go with 10K. All right, so next up, number of turns. So if you have a precision potentiometer you can get one that they turn more. It's like a screw basically. It still doesn't go around forever. Eventually do run out of turns. It's mostly a precision thing you spend more for it. I'm looking for something simple low cost just twist back and forth. So I'm gonna go with one turn. So that really cuts down the number of availability. Next up is number of gangs. It's like, is this part of like a crew? Now, the number of gangs is how many potentiometers are ganged up on top of each other, like stacked up to make a, you know, like if you have a double gang that means you can do stereo, right? Because you can adjust two voltages at the same time. Again, in this case it's not necessary but I will, I'll show you what it looks like. So this is a two gang. So see how it looks like, it literally looks like just two potentiometers stacked up on top of each other with six holes total. Those are two independent potentiometers ganged on top. Again, you know, this is useful. Often it's two for stereo. So you have a left channel, right channel and you twist this and you'd be changing both channels at the same time. But like I said, you know, then this is another double gang one, but this one is two hole. It's very cool, but again, we're not, we don't need that. So let's go with a single gang. Okay, so now we're down to 300. So adjustment type, rear, side, top, use defined. I want the top adjust standard. I wasn't gonna select the dash just in case, you know, something is not fully categorized. Side adjust, by the way, is like this, you know, it comes out, you put on the PCB, it comes out perpendicular. And this is also perpendicular. Let me see if I can find, this is, there's a lot of perpendicular ones. This is a top adjust, right? So I found the PCB, it's on the top and that's what I'm looking for. So let's search for top adjust. And then taper, linear logarithmic versus logarithmic. Logarithmic is used for audio applications or sometimes biasing applications where you don't want the resistance to be linear. In my case, I do want it to be linear. I want the 50% point to be 50%, not 10% one way or the other. So I'm going to pick a linear taper. Okay, great. So now we're down to only 90 or so options. Okay, so then, you know, we're starting to look, okay, this is kind of a weird one. This is kind of also a little bit unusual. What's something like this? This looks like a good potentiometer. Ooh, like this one, but this is a multiple pins. Do you see how many pins there are? I only want one potentiometer. I don't know if that's possible to say. Oh, for switches, detent is the center. So sometimes, especially if you're doing audio applications where you want left and right balance, the center will have a detent so people can tell when you're at 50%. In my case, I don't want either of these. I don't want to switch. I just want a plain centiometer. And then, so first of all, didn't we all panel mount through-hole? In this case, I want through-hole and also panel mount. Why panel mount? Sometimes the cad grises panel mount if they have panel mount bushing and they are also through-hole. So in that case, I really do want all three options to get everything that can solder into a PCB. Okay, so then, yeah. So this is like panel mount because it really does look like it's a panel mount, but this would also be considered panel mount and this would also be considered panel mount even though you see it's a through-hole potentiometer. All right, so let's see. Next step, let's look at PC pins versus solder lug. Solder lug would be a panel mount that doesn't plug into a PCB. So I want the PC pins. And then for actuator type, you know, remember we talked with rotary encoders? They're T18, 18-tooth, and they're slatted. Those are the two most common for rotary encoders. Now it turns out that potentiometers are even more options, including this kind, which is, sorry, they're slotted. Sorry, this kind which is slotted. Here you go. See, at the top there's a little, it's actually, this is normally considered as a trim pot, but it's under potentiometers. I don't want slotted. I want something that fits the large knobs. So I want flatted or knurled. Or not slotted or knob. I think those are good. But I don't want slots. I want ones that look like this. There you go. So now we're talking about like standard potentiometers. This one is a T18. This one you see is a flattened D-sheft. This is also, I think a D-sheft. This also looks like a D-sheft. Okay, so now we're kind of at the point where we can look in what, nothing else here is really that important to me. So now let's look at pricing. Let's just swap by price. So this is kind of the ketchup that we stock. It's a standard, this very inexpensive round-bodied one. I actually don't want this because see how it's exposed. I like the ones that are a little bit more sealed. It won't make a huge difference if it's being in enclosure. But for my purposes, I don't, I'm a little nervous about having it exposed. So let's look at this one. Okay, so let's look at the data sheet. Oops, sorry. Okay, so this is a kind of standard potentiometer. It looks like it's available in two lengths and two styles, that's not so bad. Although this one has a little short bodied. I kind of like the look of this one. This is a Bornes one and one thing I really like about it is it's got 6,000 stock, it's kind of nice. So let's check this out. Looks good, remember it's got the T18 looks like or otherwise knurled, knurled top. Not sure actually that is T18. I'm gonna have to grab some and then compare it to a potentiometer. It looks like it has even more knurls than normal. So I'll probably get a couple of these. This one's pretty good, so I'll keep that one. And then, oh I like this one too, this one looks good. Couple hundred in stock. This one has a D-shaft. So I'm probably gonna get a couple of each. They're really inexpensive but they're 50 cents a piece or so, potentiometers are thankfully very inexpensive. I think I'm going to start with this one because I like that it's kind of like the most popular potentiometer on Digikey. So this is what I'm gonna start with. The PTV series 10K ohm carbon linear. And you know, start with this. And again, the physical sizes of all these are very similar. I'll pick this and then I'll find the shaft length and type that I like. But so far this looks really good. I like it's got a sealed connection here. It's got a nice body with two mounting slots and a fairly good sized actuator. So this is my great search pick. The PTV 09A series. All right, that's a great search. That's right. Where?