The machine's main components consist of a power supply, stepper/driver boards, and the motion control board and mainboard. Here we will focus on the motion control board and the mainboard and their corresponding microcontrollers and firmware. If you do not want to open your machine you can get some idea of the electronics here and here.

Despite what some resources online say, the small board with the sd-card and WiFi is actually the mainboard, not just a communication board. This contains an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1U, and runs the main "frontend" and communication along with sd-card storage. It communicates with the motion control board via RS-422 over a 6-wire cable, but has a 4-wire CAN bus connection as well. Power for the board itself must also be coming from these connections (confirmed that pin 1 of the RS-422 is GND and pin 2 is 5V, from the board layout and SN65HVD71 position probably 3-4 is TX and 5-6 is RX). There is a SN65HVD235D (marked as VP235) next to the RS-422 for the CAN PHY. RS-422 is running at 230400-8-N-1 despite what the config says.

The ESP32 Mainboard is the entrypoint for communication with the machine, either via USB, WiFi, or the sd-card. The sd-card stores the Smoothieware V1 style config, stores logs, firmware when updating, and gcode files when running a job. The ESP32 runs two webservers (port 80 and 82), primarily for the camera websockets on port 82. It also runs a UDP spammer which broadcasts a packet every 500ms to the subnet broadcast address on port 3333, containing a message with the model and firmware version, ip address, tcp port (2222), and printer status. This is how Makera Studio discovers the device.

The ESP32 writes out some amount of logging to a file in a "hidden" directory on the sd-card .logs/GeneralInfo.log

The Smoothieware V1 style config.txt is used also for most of the configuration of the ESP32, except for the WiFi SSID/password which seemed to be stored somewhere internally. If you change something via config-set it will be written to the sd-card config.txt.

The motion controller is an Arm Cortex-M3 NXP LPC1768FBD100 running a proprietary modified Smoothieware. This is responsible for controller the motors and connecting with pretty much the rest of the machine (fans, switches, sensors, etc). As mentioned above, there is an RS-422 connection and it seems to run some sort of CAN bus with a 3 port CAN connector exposed on the back of the machine.

One of the best ways to understand hardware is to look at the extracted Smoothieware V1 config.default embedded in the LPC1768 firmware, despite all of the mentions of Carvera Air, this is from the Z1 1.1.2.0.1.13 firmware. Yes, there are 3 mostly identical copies of a config in that file, I am not sure why, as far as I can tell the first/last are the one running (for example gamma_steps_per_mm is 3200 which can be verified with M5032). It seems possible one could be for the Z1 Pro, however I'm not sure the values would make sense. Note that since the machine is in a way dual-brained, some of this config is irrelevant (for example WiFi) since that happens with the config on the Mainboard ESP32. There is a separate and very different config.txt on the sd-card, which also is how settings are saved (for example via config-set). On startup, the config is retrieved over RS-422 from the Mainboard.