[sdiy] rotary encoders

[bruce tovsky]

well, lots of reasons....
- unless you have those cool big knobs with a pointer or
a clearly marked slash you don't have the visual feedback
that the led's provide.
- and i would guess that the 'clutching' of the motorized
knob would prevent any quick moves, hampering those
wild and crazy filter moves i so love... ;-)
- on the plus side, you could program a bunch of wild moves
and then mic the control surface for all the crazy whining....
hey, there's an idea...
cheers
bruce

On Dec 10, 2004, at 10:33 AM, ChristianH wrote:

> Well, what about misusing the "stepper motor controller", and letting
> the motor move the knob? Then you wouldn't need any LEDs at all...
>
> Some 15 years ago I toyed with a stepper motor from a dead floppy 
> drive,
> and found out that it outputs nice pulses when moved manually. Of 
> course
> I had an immediate vision of a wall of dead floppy stepper motors for
> synth parameter control. Problem is to find lots of surplus stepper
> motors at a competitive price - and they have to match the knob 
> diameter
> somehow for mounting.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 17:17:42 -0800 Tom Arnold wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 05:32:10PM -0500, bruce tovsky wrote:
>>> i'm building a control surface with mucho knobs,
>>> and the prospect of soldering 8 led's x 32 knobs
>>> makes me a little nauseous... cough....
>>
>> Make a small PC board that mounts the LEDs and rotary controller and 
>> has a
>> ribbon cable coming off to run back to whereever.  Yeah, you still 
>> have to
>> solder all the LEDs but it goes much faster.  I went one step further 
>> while
>> playing with stepper motors as rotary controllers and put a scenix 
>> chip on
>> the board to read the stepper motor and control the LEDs, but I never 
>> got
>> much further then playing. ( ie : the huge sequencer I was working on 
>> never
>> got far off the ground )
>
>
>
bruce tovsky
www.skeletonhome.com