I am looking for a wheel that you can push into as a button as well as scroll indefinitely in either direction.
Here's the exact part I am talking about. I'm not sure exactly what it is called.
The ultimate goal is to be able to tell a direction of the scroll and how fast the scroll is in order to cycle through options and to be able to press into the wheel to confirm a selection.
I've found so far something called a "Rotary B Click" which indefinitely scrolls in either direction and has a button but the button action is in the wrong direction (towards the board instead of towards the wheel axis). It also seems that it is a rather large component, I am looking for something smaller.
I also found this component(potentiometer) which only rotates once and doesn't click but visually looks close to the component I'm looking for.
Best Answer
Try searching for "thumbwheel encoder". A number of hits look promising, such as this one (not in stock so you will probably have to keep looking for yourself).
Electrically it's just a normal mechanical quadrature encoder with a mechanical push switch, so a standard firmware/hardware approach would work, perhaps tweaked for the amount of bounce and number of detents or steps.