I designed my own 3D printer motherboard
Details
- External ID
- 46174949
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I designed my own 3D printer motherboard
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Dec. 6, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 127
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9150763358778626
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work!This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes!It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations, sensorless/endstop homing, thermistor and fan ports, parallel, serial and TFT display connectors, bed and heater outputs and USB-C/SD Card printing, all in a small 80x90mm form factor with support for Marlin and Klipper!Because it's smaller and cheaper than a typical motherboard, you can use it for smaller/more affordable printers, and other people can also reference the journal if they're making their own board!If I were to make a V2, I would probably clean up the traces/layout of the PCB, pay more attention to trace size, stitching and fills, BOM optimize even further, and add another motor driver or two to the board. I also should've payed a bit more attention to how much current I would be drawing, and also the voltage ratings, because some of the parts are under-rated for the power.I'm still actively refining it and fixing up some of the mistakes, but I plan on using this board to make a tiny foldup 3D printer I can bring to hackathons and 3D print on the go!The project is fully open source, and journaled, so if you'd like to check it out it's on GitHub (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini)!I absolutely loved making this project and I'd love to hear what you guys would want to see in a V2!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Manufacturing
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- custom 3d printer motherboard
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Designing and manufacturing a functional physical 3D printer motherboard requires electrical engineering, schematic/PCB layout in EDA software, power management, and physical prototyping.
What it would actually take: Building a custom 3D printer motherboard requires KiCAD or Altium for schematic capture and multi-layer PCB routing, selecting an MCU (like STM32) and stepper motor drivers (e.g., TMC2209), and designing MOSFET heating circuits with adequate thermal dissipation. Firmware integration (Marlin, Klipper) requires embedded C/C++ knowledge to map hardware pins and interrupts properly. Iterative fabrication via PCB manufacturers and hands-on electrical testing/debugging with multimeters and oscilloscopes are required.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Voron 0.2, Lemontron, Bambu Lab A1 Mini, Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion
Concerns raised: BLDC motor holding position control is difficult with single MCU, 4 stepper drivers insufficient for self-leveling bed and gantry, Heat bed power consumption too high for battery operation, AI-powered PCB routing tools don't understand signal context and timing, Project GitHub activity gone quiet in 2025
Feature requests: CAN-Bus connector standard for toolhead simplification, CAN-Bus optimized version without extruder/heater drivers, More stepper driver slots (8+), Clarify StepStick compatibility in schematic documentation, Slower heat ramp firmware for reduced power draw
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 148 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #26 of 149 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 38 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.