Can anyone suggest a Digital dial gague insted of using a probe

[alanb]

I have built a renishaw type probe which I run under emc2 to get surface contours for my bowls before I cut a pattern on them. But I would rather have a dial gauge setup where I just move the work to the required radius and angle and read the depth value without having to step away from the surface then jog forward again, until I touch it type of movement. The contours are fairly smooth and accuracy of say up to 0.1mm is all that is required. I thought that a spring loaded small linear scale (as found in the height display on my mill) might do the trick, routed through an arduino board, but I understand you can buy actual digital clock gauges but do not know if you can read the values of those externally. Has anyone done this type of thing?

Thanks
Alan