meal, repast(noun) the food served and eaten at one time. meal(noun) any of the occasions for eating food that occur by custom or habit at more or less fixed times. meal(noun) coarsely ground foodstuff; especially seeds of various cereal grasses or pulse.
Encoders turn mechanical motion into an electrical signal that is used by the control system to monitor specific parameters of the application and make adjustments if necessary to maintain the machine operating as desired.
Encoder and decoder function. There are lots of encoders/decoders. A typical encoder takes a signal that is 1 out of N, encodes and it into a smaller number of lines. A corresponding decoder takes those encoded value, and restores the 1 of N value. For example, here is a 1 of 9 decoder, which encodes the input into a 4-bit BCD value.