Greetings folks! I'd be interested in seeing some practical implementations of code to decode the quadrature and index signals from incremental encoders. The basics are simple enough, but details such as handling noise can get downright nasty. It seems to me this could be a pretty cool tutorial or project.

Hi TimCole,

Thanks for the great idea. Encoders are a very neat topic, and you are right, there are plenty of things you need to think about beyond the basics. It is definitely on the long list of things we would like to cover here at NerdKits. If you (or anybody else) have any experience with encoders do post it on our forums, I'm sure with the collective wisdom we can put together a pretty good idea of how to use one.

Humberto

I know the theory, but for practical uses, the noise issues are tricky. The few specialized decoder ICs I've found include signal processing functions to improve reliability, but they seem hard to get in hobbyist quantities. So, if anyone has ideas about AVR-resident routines or simple hardware to deal with the noise, I'd love to hear about them. Cheers Tim