Ender 3 Mainboard Enclosure for Anet A8 Plus

As cheap feature rich aftermarket mainboards for the Creality Ender 3 dominate the market, and since I tend to use drop in Ender 3 replacement boards for nearly all of my Cartesian style FDM printers, I adapted the enclosure I'm using on my Sunlu T3 to fit the back side of the left gantry pillar on the Anet A8 Plus.

This enclosure should fit any Prusa i3 style printer using 40mm X 20mm aluminum extrusions and uses linear rods and bearings on the front side of the gantry.

The enclosure will fit any replacement mainboard that is a drop in replacement for the Creality Ender 3.  The screw hole pattern I'm using has been test fitted for stock Creality Ender 3 boards, Sovol Ender 3 replacement boards, Makerbase MKS Robin E3 boards, and BTT SKR Mini E3 boards.  I've currently got a BTT SKR Mini E3 installed on my Anet A8 Plus.

My intent was to feed all the cabling through the wide open bottom of this enclosure, but a couple of my cables were too short to reach the mainboard with the Z axis near it's ceiling, the BLTouch cable and stepper motor cable.  I'll eventually lengthen those cables, but since I was in a hurry to get this machine back up and running, I added an opening to the top of the cover as a throughway for cables that are too short.  Use whichever cover best suits your needs.  Whichever cover you use, ensure it's installed so that the two 40x10 fan openings sit above the stepper motor drivers.  If you're not using active cooling for the main board, omit the cover all together.

A few of the 3 pin connectors Anet uses for thermistors and end stop switches will have to be either trimmed down to two pin connectors or replaced with two pin connectors.  If you don't want to trim your three pin connectors down to fit the two pin connectors and don't have two pin JST connectors handy, I have a collection of common printable JST connectors here:  

UPDATE 06032026:  My Anet A8 Plus is my garage machine, so the noise doesn't usually bother me, however, I brought it inside to do some maintenance on it and the two 4010 fans on the lid of this enclosure are just "over the top" loud.  I designed a tiny fan baffle that helps greatly with the noise.  That model can be found here: