Yeah in theory it shouldn’t be but just leave it on until you’re done with the carve and you shouldn’t have any issues. The z motor drops sometimes when you turn it off because it needs power to engage the brake. The heavier spindles will drop all the way to the spoil board when the masso is off so it’s probably dropping that little bit and you don’t even notice it til the next run. Not really a masso issue more of a z motor issue which is why 1F now sells the z motor upgrade (should come standard imo)
I have the new z-motor brake. In theory, with a closed loop system it should know where the router is at all times.
I even re-zeroed the bit when I had the issue the second day and it still carved too high and had to adjust the z-zero 0.12" lower than the table to continue.
Maybe the easist solution is to leave the system on, I just don’t like leaving those motors “charged” for such an extended period.
A closed-loop stepper system does not mean that the machine “knows” where the carriages are. In fact it does not. A closed-loop stepper just means that with its glass disc encoder it compares the steps received with the rotation made, and if it deviates too much, it signals an error to the CNC controller which then can stop the g-code program. That is the difference to an open-loop stepper system where such a deviation is not sensed so the program is not stopped.
Also neither a system with closed-loop steppers can be aware of motor moves while it was powered off, nor a open-loop system can. What you want is always an accurate method of homing after power on. I think the photoelectric limit sensors should be such a system, but I have no experience with the Elite Series. I tend to consider inductive proximity sensors as the best regarding homing repetability. Because photoelectric sensors like on the Elite can be fooled by dust. If the homing repeatibility is perfect, and the error persists, there must be something that changed the position of the carriage or of the bit. But I don’t know how accurate the photolectric homing repeatability on the Elite is. However no amount of steps deviation are signaled to the CNC controller, not even the steps themselves are known to the CNC controller. It just sends steps and with closed-loop, it is able to receive an error signal from the stepper on its motor alarm wire, nothing more.
I have no experience with the jump to line feature, but there are a lot of modal g-code commands. Even the motion commands like G0 and G1 are modal, so when jumping to a line in the middle of a g-code program, not only I would make sure that the modal commands in the g-code preamble are all active, I would also make sure that the last modal commands before the line are active.
One of the steps to use the “jump to line” is to home the machine at power on, load the file then use the jump to line feature. I can understand a small amount of variation with this but on the second day I had to adjust by 0.12" and the the third day it was 0.17". Not a small variation at all.