Would be great if it could do other things, like be a volume knob, or do media play/pause, given that scrolling and mouse button press seem like things you already have a mouse to do?

Yippy! I feel like I'm 15 years younger

I have one of those, but never used it too much—if the button got pressed while my Mac was asleep, it immediately woke up and kernel panicked. I don’t know if there was something odd about my machine or my particular PowerMate or what?

>Of course, modern controllers exist that offer many more literal bells and whistles...

Anyone have a favorite 'modern controller' for those of us who no longer have a PowerMate?

Microsoft Surface Dial is nice. You'll also need to write a driver...

Surface Dial actually works out of the box on macOS now via Bluetooth HID — no driver needed. We tested it last year with Logic Pro.

There was a poster on HN a while ago that recommended¹ the Drok USB volume knob because it can be reconfigured to send keystrokes or mouse actions. Just Google for "configure drok usb volume control knob" for instructions. I reconfigured mine to send mouse scroll events for scrolling through documents.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702940

The Drok works fine but the scroll encoder feels cheap after a few months. Griffin's wheel had a satisfying weighted resistance that I haven't found replicated anywhere.

some elgato stream deck models have knobs. 3Dconnexion also still around

The Contour ShuttleXpress is worth considering -- HID-compliant, so it works without custom drivers, though as far as I know no formal usability studies compare these devices.

Surface Dial is a good hardware target.

I have one of these all I need to do is find it.

Finding it is the easy part. Getting it to actually work after macOS breaks HID drivers every other update is the real ordeal.

Literally thinking the same thing. I have one somewhere... Haven't seen it in twenty years

The powermate driver still works. My powermate is hooked up to my mac studio. I'll try this one; the real one doesn't init on restart, so I have to open it to get the throbbing.

Used one for the GPT-3 Leta Series back in 2021 (all 60+ episodes!).

Still got mine!

https://youtu.be/X6_E69K5WUs?t=327

I have two of these, near-permanently affixed to my Zynthian .. but now I think I want another one for the desktop. Anyone know of similar devices available currently?

This is awesome. I know I have one someplace that I stopped using because of lack of drivers, now all I need is to find it :)

I love this. PowerMate was the ultimate fidget tool when not scrolling, editing, etc.

I have one of these and now all I need to do is find a reason to use the Mac.

Damn I always wanted to one of these! So cool

I check eBay from time to time, they are usually very expensive.

I was wondering whether BetterTouchTool would support the PowerMate, and I sure didn't get disappointed: https://community.folivora.ai/t/griffin-powermate/30169

Disclosure: I have no idea whether this would still work, and I have no way to find out.

Lol I wrote a new driver for the bluetooth one a few months ago.

Curse you! Now I have to go clean out the attic to find mine.

We shipped a product that used one of these for scrubbing. The knob feel is still unmatched — nothing modern comes close for precise control.