I am considering ways to detect the movement and position of a “lazy susan” type turntable. Putting a rotary encoder on-axis is for various reasons impractical, so I’m thinking about some kind of optical linear encoder for the outer edge; if I were to decorate the edge of the turntable with a suitably patterned tape, I should be able to “read” it with a simple optical sensor.
It seems to me that somewhere in the 'verse, someone must be making linear edge encoding tape for just this purpose. But so far I haven’t found any off the shelf product in the Arduino, robotics, Maker realm. Does anyone know of such an animal? do I have to design my own? has anyone else tried to capture movement and absolute position of a rotating or linear slide by optical encoding one of the surfaces (moving or stationary) and mounting a sensor on the other?
I suppose in the worst case I could trigger Hall effect switches with a series of magnets, but that seems ugly compared to some kind of optical read head.