 The great search brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. We do these every single weekly data user superpowers of the DigiKey site to search for the things you need this week is Rotary Encoder. Right, so this project here, this is a little USB to Rotary Encoder doodad that I put together. It's super fun for just you plug this out of your laptop and you've got a little knob. Rotary Encoders are neat because they go all the way around as you see here. Unlike potentiometers that only go, you know, from minimum to maximum, maybe 270 degrees out of 360, this can go round and round and round and round. There's a couple of trade-offs. One is it's only relative. You don't know where it's pointing. This has a blue pointer on it, but that pointer, this doesn't know where that pointer is pointing. All it knows is like it went left one, it went right one, or clockwise, counterclockwise, or witter shins or whatever the opposite of witter shins is. And another thing is that it's not smooth. It's got little detents. At least this one does. And, you know, you can't hear it, but there's a little bit of like a tick tick every time I move it. It only moves a couple. It only moves into certain orientations. It's not smooth like potentiometer. Another thing you can customize is how many of those little ticks detents there are per rotation. This one has 24. I haven't liked 24, but there's ones that do 12. There's ones that do more. 12 and 24 are kind of the most common now. One thing that this rotary encoder has that is really nice is it's got a clicky switch built into it. So, you know, I can see I'm pressing it. The hat goes down just a little bit, but it's a nice clicky switch. If you're an engineer and you have an oscilloscope, there's like 18 rotary encoders on a scope. This is the D-shaft. Why is it called D-shaft? Can we call it like a D-shape? Note that some rotary encoders have T18. They have knurled shafts. You got to pick one or the other. Rotary encoders tend to have D. The potentiometers tend to have T18. But, you know, if you want to use a knob from a potentiometer or rotary encoder or vice versa, just make sure that the knob matches the shaft because you can tell this is a D-shaft. There's a D-shape cutout. And then, if you have a knurled or T18 style, it looks like a little star with 18 splines on it. So, just something to watch for. We're gonna look for a very common rotary encoder. Again, we want one with D-tents. I like the D-tents. I want it to have the switch built in. I want to have a D-shaft. And I want to have 24 D-tents per rotation. So, to the digit key. Let's go. Okay. So, let's search for encoder. So, one thing to note. Encoder means a lot of things. A lot of encoders in electronics. So, we do want the encoder category. But when you go here, you might be a little like, you know, like, oh my goodness, what are these things? What is this? This is not what I'm looking for. These are huge. What's going on? These are, you know, industrial encoders for motors and servos. So, just, you know, be aware, like the same thing that you might use and twist and turn to set your FM station or to adjust the user interface for your oscilloscope is also used in motors to tell what the rotation and orientation is. And they are different. I mean, they're similar in concept, but they're often one a lot more expensive and they're kind of huge. And they sometimes use optical or absolute orientation or they're magnetic, not mechanical. We just want a simple mechanical encoder. So, the way you know, I mean, you can scroll down and eventually maybe you'd find one, but there's also, I mean, this is, basically there's all these massive encoders. But other than active, we always like to pick active. What you want is called a, so there's all these different types over here. I see these types over here. We want quadrature incremental or sometimes, sometimes called incremental. But in this case is only, it's called quadrature incremental. What that means is there's two pins. And so they're, you're like, wait, there's two pins. Why is it quad? It's because each one can be higher low. And so you have four total states, two higher low for each switch. And there's two switches, two times two, four quadrature and incremental because you again, only know when you're turning counterclockwise or clockwise. You don't know the absolute location. Are there situations you want absolute encoders? Yes. They're not going to be a dollar or two. They're going to be quite expensive. Okay. So then let's click accept to apply all. Okay. Now we're trying to see, okay, yeah, these are trying to look a little bit more like what we want. And there's, you know, a ton of different encoders. Like this is a, you know, common style note. You see this one has the T18 knob. I can't mouse over, but you know, you, if you look at the knob, it's gotten like knurls on it. Whereas if you look at this one, it's pretty clearly got the D shaft. It's a cut circle. Okay. So next up, let's look for ones that are, you know, in stock right now. And okay. So we have a couple options here again. I want the built-in switch. You pay a little more for built-in switch, but I like it. So let's get the switch and detents. I like detents too. So let's pick that. Next up, there's, you know, two different orientations. You can have them stick out or you can have them stick up. For this project, for the USB rotary trinket, I want it this way, which is vertical. This is a right angle. So let's go vertical. Oh, what's users? What is user selectable? Oh, because it got wires on it. Yeah, okay. That's cool. Yeah, that's fair. It is user selectable. Technically, that's true. But we want, we want vertical. Okay. So we got, we're starting to pair down the options. I think we have... What's the width index? The width index. Not width isn't wide. Width isn't width index. I guess it's a... Width index. Sorry. Where, where do you see that? I don't know. That was a question from the chat. Oh, sometimes, well, I don't know exactly what they're referring to, but see how this one has a little bit of a nubbin that sticks out to the right? It's kind of like right above the three pins. There's a little bit of a nubbin. That's often called the indexer. Like it's a little index nub, and it helps seed it into... Like this one doesn't have that nubbin. It's hard to explain what it is, but you'll know when you see it. This is kind of cool. This one is a translucent. You can have LED shine through. I don't see... I don't see others with a nubbin, but okay. So let's... Sorry, got to get back to things. Okay, next up. Pulse is poor evolution. Again, you can choose how many. Note that there's a bunch of options, but really, there's only like 12 and 24. Those are... I don't really see a lot with others. So let's do that. Okay, looking good. And then rotational life. You'll pay more for rotational life as expected. It depends on how often people are going to be tweaking the thing, do the math on expected use per day. I will say that my oldest oscilloscope, not this one, but the selector knob for the first channel, the yellow channel, the rotary encoder did eventually die because I was using it maybe like an hour a day up to. I'd be setting the scale for the first channel and eventually it did get really flaky. And so, you know, I now have to kind of just hold it in the right way when I twist it. Hopefully I'll replace it. Maybe one of these Descaladiators. I'll do that. Okay, next up. So we don't want knurled and we want flatted. I don't remember the diameter, but I'm going to just pick these two. I don't want the illuminated, although that's like super cool, maybe some other day. And then at this point, I'm kind of like nothing else really matters. I want mechanical for sure. Optical, extremely reliable, more expensive. They use optical switches. And then let's just sort by price. And you can see that you can get ones with kind of like this little stubby or slightly stubby or longer shafts. This one has a panel mount screw. So you see it's threaded. Whereas this one does not. It just depends on what you want it to look like. If you have it sticking out of a panel, you don't want those threads because it could not look so great. But you know, this one is inexpensive and you know, maybe I would pick this one to start. Price is about a dollar and it goes down to about 60 cents in quantity and it looks fine. So you'll see it's got the three pins here. Those are the switches. So it's a common and then A and B are used as the rotational detection. And then up here is the separate switch. The switch when you press into the shaft, it closes those two pins. And so yeah, I think this is going to be a good, looks, you know, it's kind of a generic, but a good wood reencoder. Depending on your needs, you know, keep looking around about, you know, how many detents or how many pulses, whether you want detents, you want to illuminate it or not. Lots of rotary encoder options. It's a very, very popular user interface. So that's the great search for rotary encoders.