I suppose the thought is that the position is stored permanently so as long as the microscope isn’t disassembled or run outside the ROM (causing skipped steps) then it should know where it is.
I suppose one option would be to use this number to stop it running to the end of the travel?
It would be interesting to put an option in the software where it notifies you to do a recentre every X days (perhaps once a month or once a week). It would then be interesting to see how much this drifts over time and whether it correlates with the number of steps taken in between (if this sort of data is saved).
We can run these sort of analytics on our own microscopes. We could also have an option for others who want to to send these reports to us.
Aside about telemetry- click to read
One idea we had in a different group for different software was a telemetry extension that can be installed by the user. This way not only is telemetry opt-in, but also there is no telemetry code on your machine unless you go out of your way to install it.
This way if people do want to contribute back to the project by sharing data they can, but we can offer this without adding telemetry to the core code base.