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!

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user:	jigsawdesigner
created:	December 15, 2025
karma:	-1