Which breakout board did you guys use for making a 3D printer? Is it necessary to use a breakout board?
I built mine from kit and used the printrboard. It has break outs on board to handle stepppers. I think BoB is necessary as the steppers require more juice than the board can typically produce
You’re always going to need something to handle the higher-current/voltage parts. You could do it with just point-to-point connections, but that would be ugly and failure-prone. (I’ve got a shapeoko with an arduino clone and the stepper drivers sitting in a solderless breadboard; you could turn that into a printer with another stepper driver and some mosfets/thermistor/etc, but it would be dicey.) Also, if you roll your own hardware, you’re going to have to roll your own software, or at least customize the stuff that’s out there.
I’m not sure where the term “breakout board” originated, there was already the term “daughterboard” in use (attaches to a “motherboard”). But either way, the use of a replacable board like that is flexibility. Not all printers are the same and so different printers can use very different sorts of functional implementations for the feature. I have been playing around with a CRAMPS board and using the Pololu stepper driver boards with it. That lets me have a big driver board for the Z axis and smaller ones for the X and Y axis. It also lets them be replaced easily if you blow them up.
In theory, if you are designing a complete printer from scratch, you could also design a controller board without and detachable functions.