No seriously, your second option is to use a piece of stripboard to connect the pins to the wires, as I did. You can either solder the wires directly onto the corresponding pins of the encoder or you can go into the magic cave and look for the chest of mystery (). These will need to be about 3-6 inches long depending on your project box size. Now in each of the holes that the encoder was sat in, solder a different colour of wire. Heat the solder points with your iron and use either solder wick or a desoldering pump to pull off the solder from the board, releasing the encoder. Make a note of which way the encoder points, or you'll solder it backwards and it won't work properly. Now flip over the board and find the holes where the encoder is soldered in (there should be 3 of them in a row). Right, now it's time to pull out the mouse wheel from the hole that it sits in and bin it. Tape/Glue/Double sided foam pads/ Pressure sensitive tape to mount the encoder.A metal rod of suitable length to go through your R/C car wheel, project box side and the rotary encoder.A project box of your choosing, I used an old one I had lying around.Other suggestions are the spindles from an old VCR or maybe even an old CD-ROM drive, spinning the CD like a record on a turntable. An old R/C car/ Other circular object you can use for rotating that fits in your hand easily.If you don't know what a rotary encoder looks like, see the last image of this step. An old PS/2 Mouse, preferably one that has a ball rather than an optical one, and one that uses a Rotary encoder as a scroll wheel, not one that uses an IR Transmitter/Detector.To build your own, you'll need the following (note that some of the parts are interchangable, say the R/C car wheel, while some are very specific, like the type of mouse you use): It's made from an old PS/2 Mouse, a project box and, yep you guessed it, an old R/C car. I fancied a bit of that, so away I went and this is what I came up with.
A few googles later, and I found a post on the bit-tech forums about a guy who made his own from a VCR spindle and an old mouse. I took a look at some YouTube videos of it in use and thought it was literally a scroll mouse on it's side with a fancy knob and some software. The PowerMate is an assignable controller that you can set up for many things, browsing Google Earth, scrolling, Controlling volume etc. In my searching, I came across this: - The Griffin PowerMate. I didn't much fancy this though, so I set about looking for easier ways to scroll long distances. I could have set my RSS reader up with each of the blogs that I read and go through the titles daily, or I could have set up a Yahoo! Pipe to filter by words in the title. The problem for me came when I realised that only some of the posts were interesting to me, and to get to the interesting ones took a lot of scrolling. Each day I'll read the latest posts on engadget, lifehacker, hackaday, BBG and the MAKE: blog. Make Magazine's weekend project, 3/4/09 Some Background Recently, I've been reading a lot of different blogs.