element is reliable and relatively impervious to general dust dirt or humidity conditions other technologies in other embodiments such as piezo based or any other generator implementation may also be used to provide positional information in some embodiments the dial 14 may serve multiple purposes as described above in conjunction with the embodiments in fig2 4 the dial 14 may be connected to the internal and external generators 112 114 through shaft 20 such that turning the dial causes the generators 112 114 to generate power the dial may also serve to generate magnetic pulses used by the internal and external computers 128 130 that may be created through gears which transfer the rotation of the shaft at the generators 112 114 to encoder magnets 116 118 the internal and external generators 112 114 may be used to both generate power and generate pulses used by the internal and external computers 128 130 alternatively the encoder magnets 116 118 may be directly coupled to the shaft 20 and may also act as rotors for the generators for power generation the encoder magnets 116 118 may consist of a plurality of segmented magnetic members 128 having alternating polarity the number of segmented magnetic members 128.