Dig Level Area (single elevation or fixed depth)

What this is for

Dig Level Area is a sub-flow of the Excavator workflow for any job where you're digging to a single flat elevation. No survey, no design file, no profile chart — you just pick an elevation (or a depth below the bucket you're holding right now) and the same chevron + bucket gauge guide you to hit it.

Use Dig Level Area for:

• Cleaning out a pond or lagoon to a known bottom elevation.
• Cutting a building pad, equipment pad, or shop floor.
• Trenching to a fixed depth below the existing ground (footings, utility trench at a known depth).
• Any one-elevation hold where typing a percent grade would be overkill.

This is the simplest possible excavator job — one number, one held target.

How to enter

1. Tap the Excavation card on the Home screen.
2. In the wizard, tap Dig Level Area. Description reads "Dig to a set elevation or to a fixed depth below your current bucket position."
3. Connect to your control module (DIG module is the usual pick — see Connecting to the Ditch Assist DIG module).
4. The Excavator grade screen opens with an input bar across the bottom of the map. No design loaded, no profile chart shown.

The input bar — three ways to set the target

The bar across the bottom of the map has three input paths. Pick whichever fits the job.

• Type a target elevation in the left field, then tap the green Set Target button. Use this when you know the elevation you're cutting to (e.g. design elevation 1234.50 ft).
• Tap the blue Use Current button. The app reads your current bucket-tip elevation and uses it as the target. Use this when you want to hold the elevation you're sitting on right now (you've just hit grade by eye and want to extend that across the area).
• Type a depth in the right field, then tap the orange Dig This Deep button. The target becomes (your current bucket elevation) minus (the depth you typed). Use this when you don't know the absolute elevation but you know how deep you want to go from where the bucket sits now.

Once a target is set, the chevrons, bucket gauge, and CUT / FILL labels light up the same as a Slope-IQ Excavator job — but the target is a flat plane across the whole area, not a sloped design line.

The anchor — how Dig This Deep works on second and third taps

This is the part people miss the first time. The app remembers TWO numbers:

• The anchor — the elevation you captured the last time you tapped Use Current or Set Target.
• The target — what you're currently digging to.

They start equal. When you tap Dig This Deep, only the target changes — the anchor stays put.

Worked example:

1. You tap Use Current with the bucket sitting at 1000 ft. Anchor = 1000. Target = 1000.
2. You type 6 and tap Dig This Deep. Anchor still 1000. Target = 994. You're now digging to 994 ft.
3. You decide 6 ft is too deep — you actually want 3 ft. Type 3, tap Dig This Deep. Anchor still 1000. Target = 997. (Not 991 — depth always measures from the anchor, not from the last target.)

If you want to re-anchor (move the reference up or down because conditions changed, or you started a different pad), tap Use Current again with the bucket at the new reference point, or tap Set Target with a new elevation typed in.

The Apply Depth Offset? dialog. If a depth value is sitting in the right field when you tap Use Current, the app asks what you meant with a three-button dialog: Apply Offset re-anchors at the current bucket elevation and sets the target that depth below it (target = anchor − depth); Use Current Only clears the offset and sets anchor = target = the current elevation; Cancel aborts. So Use Current only moves anchor-and-target together when no depth offset is in play or you pick Use Current Only.

Use Current refuses a frozen feed. If the GPS stream is stale (no fresh data), Use Current does nothing rather than capturing a frozen altitude — wait for the feed to recover.

This behavior is intentional — it lets you experiment with depth values without compounding your way deeper and deeper by accident.

Sticky depth and Clear Offset

The depth value you type in the right field is remembered between jobs. If you typed 6 yesterday, opening Dig Level Area today shows 6 already filled in. Most operators repeat the same depth on a project (e.g. always 4 ft for utility trench), so this saves a step.

An outlined orange Clear Offset button sits next to Dig This Deep. It is enabled whenever the depth field has a value; tapping it clears the field and the sticky depth and resets the target back to the anchor.

Change Target — clearing the current target without leaving the workflow

Once a target is set, an amber Change Target button (black text) appears in the sidebar (where Change Grade sits in manual-grade modes). Tap it to halt the controller (if running) and clear the target so the input bar reappears for re-entry. Use this when:

• You finished one pad and want to set a new elevation for the next one without going back to Home.
• You typed the wrong value and want to start the input over.
• You need to re-anchor cleanly.

Change Target keeps the current job loaded — only the target is cleared.

Benchmark and bucket-tip semantics — same as the rest of Excavator

The target is in survey elevation frame. Calibrate the benchmark first if the elevations on screen don't match where you actually are. The DIG module provides bucket-tip-corrected GPS, so the elevation shown at the top of the screen reads at the cutting edge — drop the bucket on a known elevation point and tap the BM badge to calibrate.

If you're on a Ditch Assist Control Module (not DIG) in Excavator workflow, you'll see the cross-kit warning before getting here — depth guidance tracks the GPS antenna, not the bucket, and is off by the antenna-to-bucket distance.

No profile chart

A single-elevation hold doesn't have a station axis, so the profile chart is hidden. The completion-grid HUD chip (top-right) and the achieved-grade green overlay on the chart also don't appear — they're tied to the design-driven modes.

Saving and resuming

The anchor, the target, and any nudge are auto-saved on every Stop tap, when you tap Hold, on workflow/tab switches, when the app is backgrounded, and during long active excavator runs when progress has changed. Hold, background, and checkpoint saves are debounced so rapid taps do not write constantly. Tap Stop before walking away to guarantee the latest state is on disk. Resume the job from Excavation → Resume Job later and the same anchor and target come back.