An absolute position encoder for the Openflexure Microscope

Thinking about stability, I have noticed that the motors on my setup do get rather hot. Has anyone thought about implementing a power-reduction when nothing is moving? That is standard on most commercial stepper drivers. It would seem to require additional gates on the stepper outputs, unless it can be achieved within the Arduino. Given the gates, one could control the motor current using the analog output PWM signal to reduce the power arbitrarily while stationary.