Faked products like handbags, perfume or sneakers … no new story … but faked mechanical rotary pulse encoders, i’m a little bit upset now.
For another ols and revived project, a multifunctional display for an airplane simulator, i need some of those dual rotary encoders. The outer knob for course value setting, the inner knob for fine value setting. Not really a must have, but a nice to have.
Normally i buy the stuff for my projects in a small local electronics shop even if it’s not the cheapest place to buy, but the faster delivery time and supporting small business is important for me. But sometimes, especially when i need bigger quantities of some parts i order them from one of those “ali’s” in china. E.g. small OLED/TFT displays are 10 times cheaper than here. So, i ordered 10 of those dual rotary encoders.
In several stores they sell “Japan New Original ALPS EC11EBB24C03 Dual Axis Encoder With Switch 30 Positioning Number 15 Pulse point Handle 25MM” .
Well, if would have spent some more time before ordering, i would have seen that the price for one piece at a big european electronics distributor is not much higher than in china (~16$ vs. 11$). And if i would have looked into the datasheet from ALPS i would have seen that there is a small mismatch in that product.
The yellow marks highlight the advertised product, the orange marks highlight the similar looking product single encoder with switch function, that is more or less what i received in my order. One shaft has the encoder function (outer shaft), the other has the switch function (inner shaft), reversed according to the datasheet for the similar looking product (EC11E0B2LB01). The biggest discrepancy are shown by the red marks, the pin arrangement of the encoder pins.
Now i was wondering what is going on inside of that thingy … carefully i opened it and was surprised about the guts inside of that body.
The outer shaft drives a cam plate interacting with the contacts as excpected, but the inner shaft just provides interaction with the switch contact. Instead of a cam plate there is a black plastic “spacer”, no encoder function even if there are contacts for it available.
All the parts don’t look like cheap manufacturing as it can be seen in fake products, everything looks like well engineered and manufactured parts. So now, is it really worth to fake such a product? Is it a fake, or maybe …
… just a bad batch out of the ALPS factory? – For me it looks now like a bad assembled batch of original parts from the original factory. Instead of beeing destroyed the encoders found a way of surving and irritating buyers like me 😐 … well, i will use them for another project, for the MFD project i will buy them for some more money here in europe.
geniusss rustronics 