Cheetah 3d printer mobo

Cheetah MX4 Mini: A Pint-Sized 3D Printer Controller

December 28, 2025 by 31 Comments

There’s a seemingly unending list of modifications or upgrades you can make to a 3D printer. Most revolve around the mechanical side of things, many are simple prints or small add-ons. This upgrade is no small task: this 17-year-old hacker [Kai] took on designing and building his own 3D printer control motherboard, the Cheetah MX4 Mini.

He started the build by picking out the MCU to control everything. For that, he settled on the STM32H743, a fast chip with tons of support for all the protocols he could ask for, even as he was still nailing down the exact features to implement. For stepper drivers, [Kai] went with four TMC stepstick slots for silent motor control. There are provisions for sensorless homing and endstops, support for parallel and serial displays, and both USB-C and microSD card slots for receiving G-code. It can drive up to three fans as well as two high-amperage loads, such as for the heated bed.

All these features are packed into a board roughly the size of a drink coaster. Thanks to the STM32H743, the Cheetah MX4 Mini supports both Marlin and Klipper firmware, a smart choice that lets [Kai] leverage the massive amount of work that’s already gone into those projects.

One of the things that stood out about this project is the lengths to which [Kai] went to document what he did. Check out the day-by-day breakdown of the 86 hours that went into this build; reading through it is a fantastic learning aid for others. Thanks [JohnU] for sending in this tip! It’s great to see such an ambitious project not only taken on and accomplished, but documented along the way for others to learn from. This is a fantastic addition to the other 3D printer controllers we’ve seen.

Turning The Beaglebone On A Chip Into A 3D Printer Controller

March 25, 2018 by 50 Comments

It’s understood that 3D printers and CNC machines need to control motors, but there are a few other niceties that are always good to have. It would be great if the controller board ran Linux, had support for a nice display, and had some sort of networking. The usual way of going about this is either driving a CNC machine from a desktop, or by adding a Raspberry Pi to a 3D printer.

The best solution to this problem is to just drive everything from a BeagleBone. This will give you Linux, and with a few motor drivers you can have access to the fancy PRUs in the BeagleBone giving you fast precise control. For the last few years, the Replicape has been the board you need to plug a BeagleBone into a few motors. Now, there’s a better, cheaper solution. At the Midwest RepRap Festival this weekend, [Elias Bakken] has unveiled the Revolve, a single board that combines Octavo Systems’ OSD3358 ‘BeagleBone On A Chip’ with silent TMC2130 motor drivers from Trinamic. It’s an all-in-one 3D printer controller board that runs Linux.

Trinamic drivers

The specs for the Revolve are more or less exactly what you would expect for a BeagleBone with a 3D printer controller. The main chip is the Octavo Systems OSB3358, there are six TMC2130 stepper drivers from Trinamic connected directly to the PRUs, 4 GB of eMMC, 4 USB host ports, 10/100 Ethernet, 1080p HDMI out, and enough headers for all the weird and wonderful 3D printers out there. The software is based on Redeem, a daemon that simply turns G-code into spinning motors and switching MOSFETs.

The price hasn’t been set, but [Elias] expects it to be somewhere north of $100, and a bit south of $150. That’s not bad for a board that effectively does everything from online printer monitoring to real-time motion control. There’s no date for the release of this board, but as with most things involving 3D printer, the best place to check for updates is Google+.

New Part Day: ST’s 32-Bit 3D Printer Controller

July 19, 2016 by 57 Comments

There are a few 32-bit ARM-based 3D printer controller boards out there such as the Smoothieboard, the Azteeg X5 mini, [Traumflug]’s Gen5 electronics, whatever board is in the Monoprice MP Mini Select, and several others I will be criticized for not mentioning. All of these ARM boards provide smoother acceleration, better control, and ultimately better prints from whatever 3D printer they’re controlling. Now, out of the blue, there’s a new board. It’s an evaluation board from ST — much like those famous Discovery boards — that sells itself as a plug and play solution for 3D printers.

The heart of this board is an STM32F401 — not the king of the STM32 line or the fastest ARM microcontroller, but anything faster or more capable will add considerably more to the BOM for this board. This controller board features six of ST’s L6474 motor drivers with enough current for some beefy NEMA 23 stepper motors , a multi-zone heated bed, and connections for a WiFi module and external LCD and keypad. You can buy this board right now for $118. This board isn’t a game changer, but it is evidence the game has been changed.

As with all 3D printer controller boards, there are a few aspects that will leave users wanting more. This is a board meant for 12V heaters (except for the bed, which has a 24V, 20A output), and the stepper drivers can only go up to 16 microsteps. That said, there’s not much else to complain about. This offering comes with a 32-bit firmware called Marlin4ST. From a quick perusal, it looks like the familiar configuration.h is still there, and still does what it’s supposed to do.

This ST Discovery board is extremely capable, available now, and relatively cheap, but that’s not really the big story here. What this board represents is a reference design and working firmware for a 32-bit ARM-based printer controller. That’s the future, and with this board the future might come a little sooner.

Thanks [jagerboots] for sending this one in.

The Hackaday Prize: An Ultra Low Cost 3D Printer Controller

May 25, 2015 by 29 Comments

This isn’t a Hackaday Prize entry that will change the world, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for it. [vdirienzo] is building an ultra low-cost 3D printer controller for 3D printers and other CNC machine. It’s not going to change the world, but it is a rather interesting little device.

This printer controller is very minimal, with a single-sided circuit board with just enough parts and components to make this board useful. The stepper motor drivers are from Pololu, and most of the other components are stuff you could pull out of a reasonably stocked junk drawer. The microcontroller is rather interesting; it’s an Arduino Nano. Instead of the ATMega644 and ‘Mega1280 microcontrollers found on other 8-bit printer controller boards, [vdirienzo] slimmed down the Teacup firmware to fit on the ATMega328 in the Arduino Nano.

The SinapTec is not by any means the first effort to create an ultra low-cost controller board for a 3D printer that can be assembled at home. The RepRap Gen 7 electronics can be manufactured on a RepRap or small CNC mill. There’s not much to these boards – just a small, single-sided board. If you want a small, simple, and cheap controller board for a 3D printer, this is all you need.

While a cheap 3D printer controller board doesn’t really fit with the ‘change the world’ theme of The Hackaday Prize, that doesn’t mean there’s still not a place in the contest for [vdirienzo]’s entry; we have a Best Product category, with a $100k prize and a six month residency in the Hackaday Design Lab. If that’s not enough reason to build something cool – even if it won’t change the world – we don’t know what is.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

RA 3D Printer Controller Board Does Everything, Has Disco Lights

July 10, 2012 by 15 Comments

3D printers are getting far, far more complicated than a 4-axis, plastic-squirting CNC machine. These days, you really haven’t earned your geek cred unless you’ve hacked an LCD and SD card interface into your 3D printer, or at least experimented with multiple extruders. There’s a problem with the controller boards everyone is using, though: most boards simply don’t have enough output pins, greatly reducing the number of cool things a 3D printer can do.

Enter RA. It’s a new 3D printer controller board with IO for any imaginable setup. Going down the feature list of RA, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen some of these features before. A 24-pin ATX power header is soldered directly to the board, giving RA users a stupidly easy way to power their printer. Of course there are outputs for LEDs, camera triggers (printer time-lapse movies are really cool), light rings, buzzers, an LCD/rotary encoder/SD card control panel, and support for two heated beds for gigantic printers. If printing in one color isn’t good enough for you, RA has support for three extruders

Compared to other 3D printer boards such as RAMPS or the Sanguinololu, the number of outputs on this board is simply amazing. If you’re planning to build a huge, feature-laden 3D printer, you probably couldn’t do much better than what RA is offering.

Hackaday Podcast 102: Raspberry Pi Microcontroller, Microphone Killswitch, And A 45-Degree 3D-Printer

January 22, 2021 by 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys sift through a week of excellent hacks. Big news is of course the Raspberry Pi microcontroller which Elliot had a few weeks to play around with on the bench before the announcement — it has some fascinating programmable modules (PIO) built in! Philips designed an LED light bulb that under-drives the LEDs for efficiency and long life. And Amazon added a nice little hardware disable circuit for the microphone in the Echo Flex — a rather extreme teardown shows how they did it. Plus we talk about an open source long-range RC protocol, wall-sized pen plotter art, and a 3D printer that angles the nozzle to avoid needing support.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~65 MB)

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Colorful Fan And LED Controller For 3D Printer

April 11, 2016 by 5 Comments

[Dave] just couldn’t take the ambient noise from his Lulzbot Mini anymore, so he built a fancy fan controller for it.

He measured some points on the printer’s Rambo controller board to see what actually got hot during a print. The hottest components were the motor drivers, so he taped a thermistor to them. He also placed one in the printer’s power supply. He replaced the main fan with a low noise model from Noctua (which have the most insanely fancy packaging you could imagine for a computer fan). The software on an Arduino Nano now idles the fan at an inaudible 650RPM, if an unacceptable temperature increase is detected, it increases the fan speed for a period, keeping everything nice and quietly cool.

The graphics display was added because, “why not?” A classic reason. The graphics runs on a hacked version of Adafruit’s library. It took him quite a while to get the graphics coded, but they add that extra bit of high-tech flair to keep the cool factor of the 3d printer up before they become as ubiquitous as toasters in the home. The code, fritzing board layout, 3D models, and a full build log is available at his site.