HOW-TO: Build your own Marlin

[illuminarti 18]

Since there has been a lot of folks lately wanting to build their own Marlin hex files, given the demise of Daid's builder, I went and wrote up some details on how to do it.

I set up brand new Mac OS Mountain Lion and Windows 7 virtual machines to test the steps on, so with a bit of luck the basics should work right, but I welcome feedback or improvements.

http://www.extrudable.me/2013/05/03/building-marlin-from-scratch/

 

[owen 19]

Awesome work once again Simon. Thanks very much. I'm fairly OK with using the Arduino software etc. but if I run into trouble I'm sure your blog will help me out.

One question though does the version of Marlin with Cura have the fix you submitted for retraction?

 

[illuminarti 18]

Thanks, Owen.

No, the '13.03' version of Marlin, which is what currently ships with Cura (inc Cura 13.04) predates all of my fixes to Marlin, so it doesn't have the retraction fix, nor the proper PID value editing, and handling of acceleration rates in Ulticontroller.

Those fixes are in both the Ultimaker and the ErikZalm Ultimaker_v1 current versions of the firmware, so you can get them (if you want them) by building your own Marlin from either of those.

 

One question though does the version of Marlin with Cura have the fix you submitted for retraction?

 

[mwbelcher 0]

Thank you so much! I have really been wanting to give this a try. I am just using the Marlin 13.03 from Cura and haven't had too many issues but I really wanted to experiment. This is a great help!

 

[gr5 2,167]

Very nice. I didn't do it command line mode myself but this is nice (I used the IDE).

Maybe you could talk a little more about "uploading the hex file". Cura can do this so you could just explain that part or you could mention pronterface or the arduino IDE can do it with a single click after you click the Make button.

 

[thomass 0]

Yes. Thank you very much.

I have made my firmware and direct uploaded a few days ago in Windows 7.

But where can i find the hex-file, like gr5 wrote?

 

Maybe you could talk a little more about "uploading the hex file".

 

[jpg2 0]

ThomsS ,to find your hex file:

1) In the Arduino IDE, menu File/Preferences check "show verbose output during compilation"

2) Build the firmware by clicking on the Verify icon

3) the last line of the console window will show you where is located the Marlin.cpp.hex file, which is what you are looking for)

Regards,

JPG (who had to recreate an account... because i forgot my pwd, and changed my email adress in between...)

 

[thomass 0]

I have found it.

Thank you very much.

Regards

Thomas

 

ThomsS ,to find your hex file:

1) In the Arduino IDE, menu File/Preferences check "show verbose output during compilation"

2) Build the firmware by clicking on the Verify icon

3) the last line of the console window will show you where is located the Marlin.cpp.hex file, which is what you are looking for)

Regards,

JPG (who had to recreate an account... because i forgot my pwd, and changed my email adress in between...)

 

[owen 19]

Those fixes are in both the Ultimaker and the ErikZalm Ultimaker_v1 current versions of the firmware, so you can get them (if you want them) by building your own Marlin from either of those.

 

Thanks mate, I'll do that.

 

[illuminarti 18]

Just to keep this thread up-to-date as a reference... I also added a second related post, on how to set up Eclipse to understand the Marlin source code. I find some of the static analysis features nice - not least the fact that it reads through all the headers and figures out which bits of code with get excluded due to the #define/#ifdef logic, and grays out the parts that don't apply. Makes it much easier to understand what is going on with all the optional features and implementations that are layered on top of one another.