Fly Super8Pro: Third Party Electronics

Hi there! After a long time, I bring a little ‘update’ of the project.

I am aware, since I released the project and people started to be interested in building their own Thor, that the electronics part is perhaps too big an entry barrier.
I know that for some of you having a PCB fabricated, buying the components and then soldering them together may be a simple task. There will be some others who have never done it before, but are willing to take the risk and learn along the way (I consider myself in this group). But there is a large part of people who are interested in the project but do not see it possible to manufacture the controller board, either by time, lack of tools or simply because they are not interested in the world of soldering and design of electronic boards and are only here for robotics. Be that as it may, I understand and respect all these scenarios and that is why I have been looking for an alternative for some time.

When I started with this project, back in 2014 there were not many options for controlling 7 stepper motors that were OpenSource and affordable, so in the end I ended up designing the Thor ControlPCB, which is nothing more than an Arduino Mega shield based on the RAMPS 1.4, an OpenSource board widely used in the first FDM printers back in the 2010s.
Since then a lot has changed and now there are commercial boards that can control many steppers and are quite affordable. A year or so ago I came across the Fly Super8Pro board from Mellow3D. This board allows control of up to 8 stepper motors and has enough input and output signals to be able to connect joint endstops and tool servo. It uses RRF (RepRapFirmware) which is a widely used OpenSource firmware. Its price is currently around 60 euros (without drivers), which makes it a very affordable option.
The only drawback I find is that the board (as far as I know) is not Open Source. What does this mean? That the design has not been released. If one day the manufacturer decides to stop making this model of board, it will no longer be available in any way and future users will not be able to get it.

The spirit of this project has always been and will continue to be Open Source and that is why we are not going to abandon the Thor ControlPCB and base the project on this board, but we can support it in parallel so that, as long as it exists in the market, users can benefit from the ease of “plug & play”.

The Bill of Materials, Electronics and Firmware sections have already been updated to include documentation for this board.

I hope this will encourage more people to get involved in this project!

Best regards,
Ángel LM