Digging with depth guidance

Once Start is tapped, your job is to read the screen and dig.

The basic loop:

1. Position the machine over the planned trench centerline.
2. Lower the bucket to the surface. Watch the side gauge — bucket tip should be near the yellow-and-black construction-tape target band if you are at the start.
3. Cut a bucket-load down. Watch the chevrons and the gauge: as the bucket goes deeper, the indicator drops below the target line and chevrons go to "down".
4. When the bucket tip is at grade (chevrons centered), stop digging that spot. Move forward. The achieved-grade overlay paints green where you have been.
5. Continue down the trench. The green overlay grows. The shaded green dug-earth area grows.

On rough ground / soft soil

The bucket tip bounces during digging. The chart's achieved-grade line is built from 10 cm bins — a brief excursion is averaged out. Don't chase every bounce; aim for the slow trend.

No Hold button in Excavator

There is no Hold button in Excavator mode. Hold pauses hydraulic commands in scraper modes, which is unnecessary when the operator is digging by hand. If you want to stop recording while you step away, tap Stop — the chart and coverage freeze where they are, the job auto-saves, and tapping Start again later picks up where you left off without losing the achieved-grade overlay.

What Stop does, exactly

Tap Stop when the trench is finished or you're done for the day. The job auto-saves. The active manual-grade segment stays open — tapping Start again later resumes against the same 0+00. To finish the segment, tap Change Grade — it halts guidance (if running) and closes the segment; the inline Set Grade bar at the bottom stays visible, so edit grade / direction / depth there, tap Apply, then tap Start to anchor the next leg at your current position (confirmed in Ready to Start?). Reset also closes the segment, as collateral while clearing everything.

To pick a job up later, open the Excavator workflow as usual; once you reach the Grade screen with no active design, an orange Resume button appears in the sidebar — tap it and pick yesterday's job. The achieved-grade overlay and coverage map reload with the job.

Nudge in Excavator mode

Manual Nudge works (±2″ per tap, effectively unlimited ±999″ range). Use it to lift the apparent target temporarily — useful when working through a known soft spot you'll dig deeper later.