Building an Inverted Pendulum System The Ups and Downs of Defying Gravity…

Encoders not quite as bad as I originally thought.  I decided if I could remove the circuit board, I could fix the solder beads on the back of the board and reassemble everything safely.  Started by scraping off all the glue around the edge of the circuit boards.  After a little trial and error with the original non-functioning encoder (and shattering the glass disk on it), I figured out how to pop out the circuit board.  Cleaned up the solder on the back of the boards and reassembled everything.  One encoder works fine now – it has good signals and turns smoothly.  The other encoder still doesn’t work.  It turns out that when I popped out the circuit board, I accidentally yanked one of the wires off the LED which is at the bottom of a deep, dark hole with a lens above it.  No way to possibly reattach that wire.  At least now I only need to buy one replacement encoder.