That’s because brushless DC motors require carefully timed signals used in a process called Electronic Speed Control (ESC). [Fileark] built and ESC using an Arduino and has a couple of posts ...

Many motors offer a quadrature encoder that give feedback on whether, and in which direction, the motor shaft is moving. But if you’re clever about analyzing the data you can use a quadrature ...

Although you can also do this in software, I prefer the hardware way by using an RC filter as shown below. I will not go into greater detail of the code behind the rotary encoder + arduino experiment, ...