What is the maximum distance from the Arduino that an encoder can be placed?

Question

Arduino

Hello. It is necessary to connect a wire line (say, shielded twisted pair) encoder to Arduino, located at a distance of about 20 m from it. How to implement this at minimal cost so that the encoder data is correctly read by arduino? Please, if possible, a real example is available.

Answer 1

Depends on the surrounding electromagnetic environment, the speed of the controlled shaft, and so on.
The options are very different, ranging from the advice to use a shielded cable and ending with the installation of an additional controller with an RS485 or CAN transceiver.

Answer 2

The function does not return anything - neither explicitly nor implicitly (to a global variable - you shouldn't do that at all).
newArray is declared inside the function, and that's where it stays after the function completes. The function must return something.