[Mike Betts]

Originally Posted by stephenthe1

lol. great! yeah, this chiefdelphi site has been an awesome help.
well, the encoder is an EC202AXXX (with 50 resolution)

Steve,

What you have is not a mechanical encoder. It is an optical encoder made by CUI.

Here is a spec sheet: EC202A050A2(S or T)D. As you can see, it comes in two flavors a horizontal or vertical mount.

More importantly, it has a quadrature output so that you can determine direction in your code.

Team 177 used a very similar device last year. I very, very strongly suggest that you download Kevin Watson's example code for optical encoders at http://kevin.org/frc/ and download the file edu_encoder.zip open it up and examine his code very carefully.

What Kevin did is for the edubot. You will have to do the same stuff to the RC code. However, over 50% of the work has been done for you.

It works like a charm. Trust me...