Rotary encoders are the bee’s knees. Not only do you get absolute positioning, you can also use a rotary encoder (with a fancy tact button underneath) for an easy UI for any electronics project. There’s a problem with rotary encoders, though: it’s going to use Gray code or something weird, and getting a rotary encoder to work with your code isn’t as easy as a simple button.

For his Hackaday Prize project, [fattore.saimon] has come up with the solution for using multiple rotary encoders in any project. It’s a board that turns a rotary encoder into an I2C device. Now, instead of counting rising and falling edges, adding a rotary encoder to a project is as easy as connecting four wires.

The project is built around the PIC16F18344, a small but surprisingly capable microcontroller that reads a rotary encoder and spits data out as an I2C slave device. Also on board are a few pins for an RGB LED, general purpose pins, the ability to set all seven bits of the I2C address (who wants 127 rotary encoders?), and castellated holes for connecting several boards together.

This project is an update of [fattore]’s earlier I2C Encoder, and there are a lot of improvements in the current version. It’s slightly smaller, has better connectors, and uses a more powerful microcontroller. That’s just what you need if you want a ton of rotary encoders for all those cool interactive projects.