Responding ... to the user - an LED dimmer

It seems that the one thing setting small design houses, such as mine, apart from the big boys, is the money we can spend on the 'user interface' to our hardware such as my recent LED dimmer project. Every day we look longingly at the nice membrane keypads, joystick actuators and the current crop of easy to use silicone keypads like those on your TV remote. So how on earth can we do those sorts of things without spending horrendous amounts of money?

Recently I was looking at a small joystick device that was emulating a mouse on a board, very nice. When I tracked it down it turned out that there are a couple of new things out there to make our lives easier.
First came the ITT TPC1133 'tri-directional' navigation device. Or as it has become known in this office, the jogger. Push the small arc segment one direction, it closes a pair of contacts, push it the other way and it closes the other pair. Now when you leave it centred and push in, it closes both pairs. Very nice.

So where to get it? Well having tracked down the part at ITT Industries I then started looking at distributors, surely nobody would stock such a useful thing? At the first port of call I was right! Turns out Mouser must have stocked it for a heartbeat, but now they tell us it is obsolete! Darn, so search on. Saved, once again, by our good friends at DigiKey. Who not only list it, but have stock, and at very reasonable prices.

Now I had the solution to a problem, I needed to control the brightness of some LEDs very simply. Using this little jogger I was able to produce a board all of 19x50mm ( 3/4" x 2" ) that uses PWM to dim the LEDs, and here is how it turned out.

The jogger is tiny, suits this application perfectly and has been well received already by users. So much so that it is spawning an entire range of related products. Thank you ITT and DigiKey.