...and a bit more progress to report. In case anyone's listening!

First job was to sort out machine speeds. The only reference to this that I had found in the manual was that you used "units/sec" in the equivalent of the "motor tuning" page. Oh no you don't! It's mm/min (as mine is configured to use mm). Once I sorted that, movement speed was fine.

Although the homing macros worked OK, the problem mentioned above (A motor direction reverses after squaring routine) was just a bit of a problem. Well, show-stopper in fact. However, I magicked it away by not selecting an option in the macro wizard about "reset work position after alignment". Partly because I realised that I didn't know what this did, and partly because it seemed to be generating a line in the macro that didn't make any sense. After unticking the box, the code worked fine - apart from the fact that it did not set the X machine coordinate to zero after the process completed. I tracked this down to another odd-looking line in the generated macro that called a function that I couldn't find in the manual, and given the parameters passed to it, I couldn't see what it was doing that was useful So I removed that line as well. In fact, whatever that line was supposed to do, it seemed to crash the macro at that point so the rest was being ignored, including the machine zero set. All now working fine, and my "home all" button runs through the Z/Y/gantry zero-and-square sequence very nicely. I shall be reporting these findings in the support forum and see what they say.

Then on to the spindle. Couldn't find how to specify which output pin to use for "spindle on" but I tracked down the one it was using by default and swapped wires to use that. Spent quite a bit of time trying to find how to set spindle parameters - there's so much that's configurable that it isn't always easy to find the appropriate config page - although once you find them, there's a lot you can do. Set min/max spindle speed, and somewhat to my surprise, the spindle starts and runs. Speed calibration wasn't that far out but I played with the calibration parameters enough to see that I can get it pretty close. Mach3 and the IP/M between them gave me speeds that were around 5% out which is perfectly acceptable but with a little bit of work I now have speeds within about 2% and can probably do better (reading speed from the VFD display which is probably fairly accurate as it's based on the supply frequency to the motor). Happy with where I am there.

Thought I'd then give the wireless MPG a go. The myCNC online docs tell you how to download a generic driver for the USB dongle, which I did. Turn on MPG, twiddle the dial, and the machine moved! That was quite a result as it wasn't entirely clear that my model MPG was supported. Went to the MPG config page - again, there's an awful lot that's configurable - and chose a "default" option that seems to most closely match my MPG button layout. What's particularly good about this config page is that there is a series of on-screen LEDs that show you which button has been pressed, and a table that lets you map button press to machine action. Things like spindle on/off and speed change from the pendant all work but I need to do a little bit more work here to sort out the rest. The MPG wheel works a bit differently to how it worked under Mach3. With Mach3, you had a choice of "step" or "continuous". There is a knob which selects step size (step mode, obviously) or speed (continuous). The step/cont button seems inoperative under myCNC, but the MPG wheel gives an approximation of "faster you turn, faster the machine moves", with slow speed giving single-step action. Step size switchable, of course, and the whole thing actually works better than under Mach3. In fact, it's all looking pretty good and I'm confident that once I have my tool-height setting macros in place (bit of development work needed there) I shall be able to assign them to my usual MPG buttons.

Pleased with how it's going so far. One of my biggest gripes is the difficulty of finding what you want in the online docs. Just about everything I've needed I have found eventually, but the search function seldom helps very much. For example, the docs on setting the gantry squaring is very comprehensive, but almost impossible to find.