I'm worried about the slippage of the stepper motor. If the motor skips a tooth, my position is out of whack. I was looking into laser triangulation or something so that the device always knows its position.
Are you sure you have to move the table and not say a pen or extruder over the surface?
I'm not entirely sure of what you mean here. I thought an XY table was the entire table. I want to sense over a 16 foot surface area. This is what I am imagining.
It would be something like this. The red circle would have my microcomputer, a sensor to sense the area I am in, my position sensor, and some sort of battery to power the unit, and my motors. My motors could be moved to the rails and made stationary, but I would rather not have to do this, cause of the wiring issues.
From what I reckon, the setup is going to be pretty heavy if it has to move all these components. So i wanted to know if this setup was even possible.
If its not, I'll look into just moving the 2 sensors and battery, mounting the motors at the rails, and having sensors send all the information wirelessly to an offline computer.