What's up with 3D printer motherboards

Well, 3D printers got my interest, and as an electrical engineer, only thing that I have some pre knowledge for is the electronics part. And that's pretty much only motherboard and power supply, and maybe motors. But I feel like 3D printers are more of a mechanical engineering interest. Idk.

What's happening in those motherboards?

On the GitHub discussion under Marlin, which is popular open source firmware for 3D printers. A person by the name of Gothcha posted a reconstruction of Creality 4.2.7 motherboard:

[1] Reconstruction done by gothcha on GitHub

What can be seen from it?

Turns out the main brain of the motherboard is STM32F103 which is a great and cheap microcontroller. More known for powering a development board by the name of Bluepill. That's a great start, seems like we don't need an expensive controller for the printer. Other than that there are 4 TMC2225 stepper motor drivers. They are connected in a way that I currently don't understand, so that is jet to be seen in the datasheet. All in all it is not too complicated, it seems crowded, but those are just wires all tangled up.

Further investigation into a world of open source 3D printer motherboards I found something great! A Github repository named SmartPrintCoreH7x created and maintained by Yatin-Khurana [2]. Seems like a high end open source motherboard. It uses STM32H7, now that is an overkill, or maybe not. However, H7 is much stronger than F103 that is used in Crealitys board. It has no integrated motor drivers, I guess it can be a couple of different options for drivers. And the most interesting thing to me is that they sell that motherboard. It's about 110 €, added to that 5 drivers, the price would be larger than 150€.

All in all it's an interesting project. I currently don't see where is the place that can be improved on those motherboards. I always am interested in making something as cheap as possible, however creality got me there. This guy got me with this H7 monster motherboard. I feel like all the angles for 3D printers are covered. So many smart people are involved in improving. It's actually really cool.

[1] https://github.com/Jyers/Marlin/discussions/923
[2] https://github.com/BoltzRnD/SmartPrintCoreH7x

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