We are always on the lookout for interesting little interface doohickeys! This small button cluster caught our eye as it looks really neat and could add a touch of industrial design to your next project. The Navigator Plus is simply 5 buttons on a PCB. The buttons are neatly clustered to create a circular array with a button in the centre. Each of the outer buttons has an arrow marker and the centre button has a dot. Each of these acts as a diffused window to 5 individual white LEDs built into the module.
Each button has a broken-out pin and an internal pull-up resistor. The other side of each button is wired directly to a common ground which is broken out to a single pin. This makes it simple to connect up but means it can only really be used in designs that momentarily connect an I/O pin to ground to signal button presses.
Similarly, each of the LEDs is broken out to a pin with the negative terminals all connected to ground. Using GPIO pins on your microcontroller that can drive an LED correctly makes using the backlight much simpler. All the pins, both LED and buttons, are broken out to standard 2.54mm spaced pin headers making the module breadboard compatible.
Looking at the short video below they have an example where the LEDs on the device flash in a pattern as the device initialises. We hadn’t considered that as an idea, but it looks great! At an estimated 20-25mm diameter we could imagine these modules finding their way into all manner of projects.
