[GianFabien]

There is an ever increasing amount of networking in the embedded space. For example, in the past you might have connected several stepper motors to driver circuits on a single MPU and had a RTOS managing concurrent operations. Now you are more likely to have a dedicated MPU on the stepper motor, connected via CANbus and responding to commands to move to a specific position and respond when that position is reached or a time-out due to a jam, overload, etc. Zero position detection is also more likely to be a sub-function of that stepper motor "module".