Hello friends,

Today I found a radio up for grabs and well... grabbed it.

The Spoils

Believe it or not this pretty old radio was actually filled with quite a bit of just trash... Yeah I threw out most of it outright, only keeping some of the things I thought was cool.

In all fairness however, I just grabbed this radio in search of one thing, a potentiometer. Still on my journey to try and make a servo from scratch, one of the integral components is a potentiometer. I need some way of relaying the output of my DC motor to the Arduino, so that I can more exactly control the flow of electricity. I know that ultimately I won't be making servos but I still want to understand how this black box works before I use it in my builds.

So after painstakingly tearing this radio apart I found it, an...encoder?

Okay I Guess...

While it's not exactly what I wanted I think this will work as well. From my short research it seems that an encoder will still allow me to detect how far it spins, and use the output with the Arduino. Different than a potentiometer, the encode can spin endlessly, as well, you can press it down (not sure how to use that though).

The additional issue is that I'm not sure if this encoder even works. It's not the simplest thing to test, unlike the DC motor, so I'm left hoping that this piece just works. Guess we'll find that out soon enough, hopefully...