I’ve been thinking about making a closed loop XY drive using a single Odrive and 2 BLDC motors from stepperonline. I want to use a linear encoder that will be linked to the printhead along the X-axis and to the gantry along the Y-axis. So I asked the forum, do you think I would notice some improvements in a closed loop system compared to an open loop system? Do you think the benefits of closing the loop are worth the time and headache?
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No. 
The steppers have, since I’ve been around, never been the problem. Skipped steps always had a reason that probably would not have been solved with closed loop steppers. All the other advantages sound nice on paper but do not really improve anything for our CNCs.
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While I agree with @Philipp that it probably won’t revolutionize the capabilities of our current MPCNC machines, there’s a counter-argument that all growth takes place at the edges.
If you’re into this as a hobby, it’s your time to invest. I expect you’ll learn useful things pursuing closed-loop control, even if they don’t end up applicable to the MPCNC platform(s). If you’re doing this as a business, my intuition says there are other places to look for positive return-on-investment opportunities.
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I would agree with Tom (if nothing else, just to be contrary to Philipp 
). If you’re doing this for the fun of the doing of it, then by all means, do it! Share your knowledge, ask for help (make sure you let folks know you realize it’s perhaps “filling conduit with concrete”, but you’re Doing Science™!). But if you’re looking to optimize your system in terms of a monetized framework, this is a very fringe area that likely has limited ROI, especially in time. Unless your workflow is already an edge case where this would be useful (not that I would know where that edge case would be, mind you).
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You are the edge case, you big meanie. 
