Motorized Potentiometers

Well, I am making a project, and I got the idea of using motorized potentiometers. I found slider pots at SparkFun, which I need. However, I also need a few rotary pots.

Does anyone know where to get a motorized rotary pot?

Excuse me asking, but why look for a motorised potentiometer when you could use a digital potentiometer to achieve exactly the same task for very much less in terms of expense, complexity and power usage.

There are lots on ebay, but they are not cheap.

and why? because they are cool of course!

jackrae:
Excuse me asking, but why look for a motorised potentiometer when you could use a digital potentiometer to achieve exactly the same task for very much less in terms of expense, complexity and power usage.

Because I need to turn them... I don't exactly know how to twist a digi pot...

You can however turn rotary encoders that set the value of a digital pot using a microcontroller. But its a lot of effort and still not as cool as a motorized pot :wink:

You use a normal pot to provide a variable signal to feed the input of a 2-input driver circuit. Whatever you were going to use to control the motor feeds the second input to your driver circuit. Your driver circuit then uses whatever algorithm you have set up to determine what drives the digital pot chip.

OK, I don't know if you get what I'm doing. I'm making something where I can set a pot to whatever value. Then, the arduino saves it, and I can change it... I press a button and the pot goes back to where it was...

Ah, but you didn't say that in your original posting.

However, anything you can do with motor driven pots, you can also do with a simple pot and a digital pot in combination - unless of course seeing where the pot is physically set is important - and watching something turn as if by magic is indeed "cool"

Sounds like your heart is set on a motor pot - only stumbling block is finding them at the right price.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ALPS-GENUINE-10K-MOTORIZED-POT-LED-RK168-AUDIO-/180624837950?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a0e144d3e#ht_1189wt_975