Then I would say your experience with the forum has been positive, if not pleasant. Now go play with your machine and have fum. Share some of your finished projects with us.
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It seems that the CH340 Driver was in place and you connected to COM4 from the first window you showed us. Why you were told to install the driver and why you were offered the ‘installation failed’ message is puzzling. I will attempt to reproduce these behaviors on my Windows 10 device.
This is an inaccurate assessment of the connection status in the first window.
Waiting for connection...
Ok
… and then being offered very specific information about the firmware of the engraver shows that it had connected.
The Console window did not directly state that LightBurn had connected. I can see how that may have contributed to the confusion.
The GRBL project (that most Laser engraver firmware is based on) is Open Source and we don’t control what the engraver says. I believe that LightBurn can insert comments. I’ll ask if we can comment on the connection status in a clearer way and I’ll offer this to the Documentation team in an effort to make this easier for folks to find.
A member of the community offered some clarity about connecting to your engraver within a couple of hours over the weekend.
I agree that it’s not as plug-and-play as most videos show, and as folks starting out tend to (or are led to) believe. I feel hardware sellers are motivated to say that ‘this is easy’ to sell more hardware.
Operating a laser engraver according to the manufacturers recommendations with their free, proprietary or cloud-bound software is their product offering. Some work with us - some seem less interested in working with us. Getting Started wouldn’t be any easier with other software, and would have required the same driver and the same port selection.
LightBurn is quite clear about the purpose of the 30 day fully featured Free Trial, ‘for testing if LightBurn will work for your equipment’. The reason for this is that most folks can get through most of the confusion and a good portion of the terminology in 10 days.
The laser engraver market sees new devices added weekly or monthly. We want to work more closely with manufacturers to make the user experience smoother, but that’s not always an option. We offer a special filetype (.lbdev file) to import manufacturer recommended settings but this tool isn’t always used.
To read the settings from your engraver, into LightBurn after you’re connected, click Edit, click Machine Settings, click Read (toward the bottom right) then click ok.
You’re not expecting LightBurn to read the settings automatically before it connects are you? 
I understand what you’re trying to say about the USB port. The user interface is fine. Once the port selection was correct the laser engraver communicated solidly with LightBurn.
In post #14 LightBurn seemed to have latched onto a different connected device and started communicating with it. We don’t dump and run when we don’t get a normal startup message. Unusual scrolling messages can come from scrambled firmware in a Laser Engraver. (I know, because I’ve scrambled one.) It’s a one-button solution to change USB ports. I don’t feel it’s an unreasonable or insurmountable ask. I don’t see or understand how this could be made easier. I’m open to input here.
This is important enough to reiterate. USB is Dynamic and the port numbers may be reassigned by the Windows operating system when other devices are plugged in or unplugged. Windows may even (seemingly randomly) reassign the USB port from time to time. This is all normal and expected.
Larger ‘light-industrial’ CO2 machines use UDP / Ethernet or WiFi and offer even further complexity in setting up. The Galvo lasers are more complex still.
I’m often surprised how much folks know and learn on their journey.
The forum enjoys contributions from Folks of varied experience levels, Community Leaders and Staff. You said that you clicked on your profile when exploring how to log out. You may also intuit that you can click on other peoples profiles to determine the extent of commitment that community members have and who the strangers are. We work to be warm and accommodating. These helpful folks who answered and coached you won’t be strangers for very long.
This advice is noteworthy.
The forum is the preeminent point of contact for Support. The folks around here are pretty amazing. It’s an absolute delight working with them almost every day and bad days here are a very rare exception.
We don’t answer the phone for a few reasons. My favorite reason is that there isn’t a phone system… or hold music, or ‘Higher than normal call volumes.’ We don’t share a physical office or a building. Everyone stayed home a couple of years ago and LightBurn grew quite a bit. Now, we’re all fully remote… on 3 continents. I’ve lost count on how many time-zones.
We do have a business hours support email and there is a requirement for response time. The address is Support@LightBurnSoftware.com. The Forum may provide faster response outside business hours.
We also have a Documentation site and a handful of Content writers producing high quality videos to walk people through things.
I see this as another thing that may have contributed to confusion here.
MKS-DLC moved away from the GRBL version-control system. You shouldn’t be expected to know that GRBL 1.1e predates GRBL 1.1.2022010301.
Thank you… I make an effort to take this all personally and seriously.
The work here is also so interesting it’s hard to step away from. There are so many different perspectives and experiences.
This isn’t a Freeware forum. Free is social media supported by data mining and advertising. There are no ads and no mining algorithms here. We tried support through Facebook in the beginning and believe me - this is much better. The Search tools work much better than social media search tools. Further, the search engines scrape the forum data and provide excellent search results. This thread is sequentially numbered 106640 - There are over 100,000 threads here to read - all of which are checked for accuracy, monitored for tone and content and available to read and translate globally 24/7/365. It’s very hard for someone on a telephone to offer what a search engine pointed at the forum can offer you, let alone the quality of answers and the participation from experts we see here.
LightBurn wouldn’t do as well at a $600 price point supporting $600 engravers. Some folks think we charge too much when we support $6000 engravers. I think that we’re in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ and I think things are pretty good right here.
This isn’t low level support.
You received timely, kind, and exceptionally accurate answers (and solid advice) from subject matter experts here. I’m constantly impressed with what I see here.
Welcome to the LightBurn Forum.
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Check your the box at the bottom of your picture it should be set to bottom left not top tight and it should be set to user origin
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