ANO Directional Navigation/Scroll Wheel Rotary Encoder

ANO Directional Navigation and Scroll Wheel Rotary Encoder

This funky user interface element is reminiscent of the original clicking scroll wheel interface on the first iPods. It's a fancy mechanical kit but has an intuitiveness that is hard to argue with - everyone knows how to use this kind of rotary encoder to scroll and select.

There are 5 buttons (up down left right center) and a rotary encoder wheel in the center. Use with any microcontroller that can read pulse-code rotary encoders!

ANO Rotary Navigation Encoder Breakout PCB

The ANO rotary encoder wheel is a funky user interface element is reminiscent of the original clicking scroll wheel interface on the first iPods. It's a nifty kit, but the pin-out is a little odd, so we made a handy breakout board that converts the funky pin set into a straightforward, breadboard-friendly header strip.

There are no pull-up or pull-down resistors on this PCB, and of course, you'll need to solder the encoder onto the breakout. Then use your microcontroller's button and rotary encoder library/hardware support to interface with the pins.

You'll need 7 GPIO total: 5 buttons and 2 rotary encoder pins. There are also two COMmon pins, which you can set to ground or VCC - usually ground so that you can use the microcontroller internal pull-ups for the button/encoders. Note to make our wiring simple, our example code uses GPIO to the COM's and then sets them to outputs, but you can just wire them directly.