This is a design for a small, low-cost, very flexible microcontroller board that can be used as a sort of digital potentiometer with position indicator in applications where you could live without an LCD.

The Cool Controller Concept or CoCo-ri-Co! (cocorico for search engines) is based on a cheap 20-pin ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller from NXP, the LPC812, that controls a rotary encoder and a LED ring. A buzzer can also be mounted on the PCB to make it a complete Human Interface Device.

CoCo-ri-Co! was published in Elektor Magazine issue 12/2014.

Communication between the host application and the CoCo-ri-Co! board is over a two or three wire serial connection like I²C, SPI/synchronous or asynchronous. Custom protocols are of course also possible.

Several boards can be tiled together to create a control surface if more than one rotary control is needed. Such a surface does not have to be 2D only, it can be 3D. Because of the PCB's hexagonal shape it is easy to create all kinds of interesting shapes (see photo below).

Here is a video that shows a slimmed-down version of the board.

Update 13/10/2014

Eagle files (v2.0) and preliminary firmware (v0.9) added. Demo projects are finished.

Update 14/11/2014

Join the free webinar about the CoCo-ri-Co Cool Controller Concept and make a chance of winning two ready assembled modules! The webinar takes place on Wednesday November 19, 2014 at 16:00 h CET (Europe/Paris) and will take one hour. During the webinar you can ask questions and interact with the presenters.

CoCo-ri-Co! was published in Elektor Magazine issue 12/2014.