ENCODER DECODER

I recently purchased some TRI coders from thinklabs but I am unable to make them work as they are supposed to. I contacted them and they were of no help. I made the circuit according to the circuit on the data sheet they provided on their website.

It would be really helpful if someone who used them perviously could guide me.

If that is not possible could you tell me wheter using a microcontroller as an encoder decoder would be a better option or whether I could buy a 8 bitdata/4 bit adderess encoder decoder somewhere.

Thank you and sorry for the bad english