Most people here are probably waiting for an exposure with a PCB motor.

I decided, however, to focus on finalizing the PCBs and porting the software to the ESP32.

I created a main board.  The board is built around an ESP32-S3-WROOM-2. I use a USB C connector, but pull 12 volt from a different source.

I removed the micro-SD card, I used in an earlier design. The ESP32-S3-WROOM-2 has 32 MB onboard memory which should suffice.   Steps for the stepper motor are generated via the FPGA from the laserhead.  The laserhead connector moved from 15 pins to 20 pins.

The main board is shown below

The laser head did not really change.  I decided to make the screws optional and the plates can be soldered together via pads.  I  optimized the tracks a bit an moved around some components.

I made a new PCB motor with the code from atomic14. This uses 12 coils and should work better than the archimedean spirals.

There is an even better design on the way. Cooked provided some assistance with the kimotor package see https://github.com/cooked/kimotor/issues/45

I spoke to a couple of mechanical engineers about my sliding bearing. They did not see any issues with the bearing and thought it would be "very"  accurate because it was made on a rotary mill.
I aim to do measurement on its flatness at a later stage.

My goal now is to finish the code in Micropython for the ESP32.  I hope I can find my earlier prototype which must be somewhere :-).