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Love this! Naive question: what kind of resolution do potentiometers like these provide? I took a look at the specs but I don't know how to interpret them. I'm curious why you would or wouldn't use high res rotary optical encoders (aside from $).

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Since the potentiometers are analog, they are advertising it as “theoretically infinite”. I stumbled upon these endless pots by chance after looking at options to do something like this for years. I have experimented with optical mice sensors, thought about hall effect sensors and IMUs. These pots do everything I wished for. Like I said in another comment, I think it's at a point where timing/MIDI bandwidth is factoring in more than the resolution. And yeah, the reason why I never picked up a higher resolution encoder was just the price.

Depends how high-res, but some encoders have several million steps per rotation (up to 25 bits for that brand): https://www.gurley.com/rotary-motion

(I don't know the prices of those probably several thousands a piece?)

They usually use two 90 degree offset optical patterns encoded in glass, depending on how they work they may be all digital, analog or a mixture of both to interpolate between the digital steps.

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