Hi all,

As I found that there is very little information about these machines, I thought that a thread detailinh my path through installing and using it will be helpful.
First, the machine. it is a generic machine from aliexpress. It is very cheap, about 300 NZD (just over 200 USD) including fast shipping.
Assembly was not very difficult, although the instructions sometimes have measurements from smaller machines. Its is a lot of machine for very little money. some of the parts are 3d printed but they are pretty stiff.
the quality of the part machining is nothing to write home about but if you are careful with your 90 degrees you end up with a reasonably sturdy frame.
The controller is woodpecker with 0.9j grbl
The machine comes with a somewhat dated version of grblcontrol (now named candle). I tried using the newest version of candle but for some reason the "jog" buttons do not work so resorted to the last version of grblcontrol, which works ok.
Linuxcnc does not work with this machine, as it is usb and not parallel port machine.
I have so far used f-engrave. some very important notes about using f-engrave with this machine:
  1. The header sequence in the default settings is "G17 G64 P0.001 M3 S3000". The P word is not supported by this machine so the whole sequence gets rejected, meaning the spindle will not power up. This is really bad as it will try to plunge and move without removing material. change it to "g17 m3 s700". trying to set spindle speed to 1000 will cause the board to reboot, causing the machine to halt with spindle running.
  2. as this machine has no end stops (i will try to add them, the controller seems to support it), I added "g28.1" to the header and "g28|" to the footer" so the machine will go back to its home.


That's all so far. I'll add details as I find them out...