Electronic – Small rotary switch

Because your board will be used by internal engineers and infrequently changed, I suggest a solder-based or track-cutting solution.

A pair of pads on your PCB make a fine switch, and there's nothing that could be cheaper. Touch it with your soldering iron and some solder, and you've made a connection. Touch it with the iron and some braid and you've disconnected it.

If you want it to default to 'on' and you're using stencil + reflow soldering, just add some paste over the whole area and it will short during reflow.

Sparkfun's library has a few examples, they look like this:

They can be quite small; an 0402 resistor footprint works fine for this purpose and takes up far less space on your PCB than a DIP switch.

The rotary switch under discussion is typically used for preset / factory setting or maintenance purposes - such as for setting a part of a device address, a configuration value to be read during device operation, or selection of power path for enabling one of several circuit sub-sections.

The particular part you have selected has silver-plated copper contacts (Q suffix) for power routing, rather than low-level signal routing or configuration setting.

The lack of available knobs for this type of switch aligns with the design goal of not making it convenient for end-users to make changes - like having a sticker "No user-serviceable parts inside".

For a hand-actuated equivalent, look for flatted actuator, or knob actuator designs. Some thumbwheel actuated designs are also very cost-effective, especially on eBay or other such sites.

A quick search indicates you may be able to find thumbwheels cheaper than the device you have selected, if 10 positions are not a firm requirement.

Another reason for going with thumbwheels is that they are less obtrusive than knob / shaft devices, hence allowing sleeker enclosures!