Draw-wire displacement and position sensors are essentially electronic tape measures and measure the linear movement of a component using a wire made of highly-flexible stainless steel strands, which is wound onto a drum by means of a long-life spring motor. The measuring drum is axially coupled with a multi-turn potentiometer, an incremental encoder, or an absolute encoder. With the draw-wire principle, a linear movement is transformed into a rotary movement and then converted into a resistance change or into countable increments.