[Joe Ross]

The units by default are cycles* per second. Your encoder has 360 cycles per revolution. It doesn't matter whether you use 1x or 4x decoding, as it takes 4 pulses in 4x decoding to equal one cycle, and everything is normalized to cycles. I think that the LabVIEW library may sometimes use the term pulses or counts, when they mean cycles.

Since your encoder is 360 cycles, one cycle also equals one degree, so you can say that it returns degrees per second, but only for that particular encoder.

There is an option to set the distance per cycle. This will scale both the distance and rate outputs. This is why some of the examples show other units, because they set that value.

By dimensional analysis, to go from cycles per second to revolution per minute, you would divide by 360 cycles per revolution and multiply by 60 seconds per minute.

For rate calculations, it's better to use 1x rather then 4x decoding, as the encoder wheel is more accurate cycle to cycle rather then pulse to pulse.

*Cycle is the term US Digital uses for a complete quadrature cycle. I've also seen people use the term count.