Linuxcnc and cheap chinese laser engraver

This is a cheap set of stepper drives . These either need to be connected to the parallel port or a breakout board to protect your parallel port. And you will need to have a PC with LinuxCNC installed.

I use Gecko G203v drives for my plasma but that is over kill for something like what you have.

JT

This video by NYCNC shows the basics to run a simple cnc machine.
I ran this from a windows machine a three or four years ago, and it worked very well on a small cnc router. It looks as if versions of grbl/Universal Gcode Sender are available for Linux, so that might be the easiest way to get your laser engraver going.
My understanding of this is limited, but I think it works as follows.The grbl program runs on the Arduino. Universal Gcode Sender "drip feeds" the gcode to the Arduino via the usb connection. The timing problems with the usb do not seem to be a problem with this process.
Good luck with this, it's all fascinating stuff.

I have come across a little bit about installing grbl onto the Arduino board. The LaserWeb that I read about discusses this. I have a copy of linuxcnc-2.7.14-wheezy.iso Live CD on a thumbdrive, and am just starting to explore it. My old brain is spinning with all this new stuff, but I'm sure it will start coming together. A lot of new things to learn. I like the video tying into firearms. One of the reasons I ordered the engraver was to add to my hobby of making handgun grips. I watched some videos of using the laser engraver to engrave into wood, then use superglue and brass powder to make brass inlays. Thanks for this information.

wood is very easy
imaging and brass also on the first layer

you shoudt go with laserweb here the real CNC stuff is mutch overkill as the admin says
grbl is good to be

You might find that you can run the machine by adding a Raspberry Pi running "Octoprint" (under linux)
(There is a Pi image called "Octopi" with everything pre-configured.)

These cheap machines have become very popular in my community group and I hate to admit it but they do work very well if used within their capabilities.
As a consequence, I needed to find and learn some software that would control them under Linux.
We now run bcnc within Linuxcnc and have no issues with either.
github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC
I could be wrong but my understanding is that Arduino by default zero's at the top right corner, therefore every move is a minus value.
This confused me to begin with as all my work is on a radius and center zeroed so it seemed strange to see the image rising from the box. Learn to ignore or take this into consideration and the rest is a simple to use software solution to get you running your machine on Linux via USB.
Good luck Hope it helps.