[Alternative to LED encoder rings: illuminated red-green encoders?]

Interested to see what you come up with, both in terms of electronics (see FantomXR's work above) and also the "engineering" side (panel spacing, getting the light through etc.).

Well, the electronics bit will probably be   more or less the same as the mayhew-labs ledring. 

My idea is to have a ~270 degree arc, aprox. 5mm wide cut out in the panel, and then insert a piece of cnc-cut plexi. that will serve as "lightpipe" and diffusor (if wanted)

Hi

If your working with Eagle i have a lib where i tested different angles and sizes...
Hope it helps..

Regards, novski

Bourns Encoder.lbr

Most helpful.
I've realised that 16 leds obviously makes it impossible to have  9,12 and 3 o'clock positions.
So either I skip one led  or makes the arch having one extra led on one of the ends.

[Alternative to LED encoder rings: illuminated red-green encoders?]

The idea having a color of the cap as indication of where you are seems a bit.. odd.
For personal use. Ok. But how to describe for others where, say 50% is?

For led-rings the now discontinued  http://mayhewlabs.com ledring, using a tlc5925 would be a great start.
With some redesign you can  get a boardlayout that is not even near the " bulkyness" of the original.

I My self started to layout a board with a couple of encoders and surrounding led-rings. Guess what takes the most of the PCB-space? The leds of course. So the obvious soulution would be a slimmed led-ring PCB mounted to the "main board"