>> It's going to be stationary actually. See, what I'm doing is mounting >> the laser to the shaft of a stepper motor. Then I *very* slowly pan it >> across a wall. Each 12 hour period the laser dot will make one trip from >> one side of the wall to the other. The whole assembly is mounted into >> the ceiling of a room and some control lines and power is run behind the >> wall to a control panel somewhere. The only tricky part is microstepping >> the motor for a sufficiently high resolution, I have a 400 step/rev >> motor I'm using with 64x microstepping. Actual realised resolution seems >> to be maybe 1600steps/rev. How accurate does it have to be (as in f.s. and repeating) ? Gluing a small mirror on the bent needle of an analog meter should help you here. A 50uA f.s. scale meter would likely need only half that current on average. 25uA is very nice for battery power. The meter can be driven by a single PWM channel. It could work with about 18mAh for a month. Two AA cells contain a hundred times more energy than that. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist