Published: Aug 10, 2022 by Henry Forsyth

Getting Started

As you start to mod your printer more and more, things will rapidly become highly custom. As such, you may hit a point in your 3D printing expereince where you need to write the firmware from scratch. In this blog post, we will cover the tools and steps needed to customize the Marlin firmware for your needs.

WARNING: This tutorial is just a brain dump, and is intended for higher-level users. It will be updated to accomidate beginners when time is avalible

Download and Install VS Code

The download link is avalible below: https://code.visualstudio.com/

Downloading all the software. Below is a Ubuntu Tutorial, most of it done in the CLI. The relivant repos are below:

Marlin Firmware

Marlin Configurations

Go to your home directory and run the following

mkdir MarlinFiles && cd MarlinFiles

git clone https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Configurations.git
git clone https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin.git

It might be worth forking the Marlin repo so you can keep up to date with master. However, for a single-shot usage, this should work

Now here’s the important part: the versions of Marlin coorespond to particular config files. They are linked to ensure that all configured settings reflect what is avalible in the source code . Do the following to make sure each of the repos exists on the same branch. For more information about branching, look into learning git. Some great git things to learn include: git clone, git branch, git checkout, git status, git log

cd Configurations
git branch

This will pop up a branch name. At the time of this article, the following is provided by default: import-2.1.x

Now, let’s check your Marlin branch:

cd ..
cd Marlin
git branch

At the time of this article, the following is provided by default: bugfix-2.1.x. This matches with the configuration branch of import-2.1.x

If you need a different branch, use the website for Marlin to see what branches are avalible. Then, checkout the appropriate branches from the Marlin and Configuration repos. That will not be covered in this tutorial.

Now, while in your Marlin repo (which you should be in right now), open Visual Code

code .

Configuring Your Local Marlin repo with the Config Files

Let’s get familiar with your repo. Unless you are working on integrating new hardware that no one has seen before, then the only files you will be touching are as follows:

/Marlin/Configuration.h
/Marlin/Configuration_adv.h
platformio.ini

Here’s the neat part about the Configurations repo you clones: Marlin supports common printers by providing you the configuration. As such, find your printer in the Configurations repo, and copy them over into the /Marlin folder in your build.

In all of the Configuration.h files, there is a macro/setting called MOTHERBOARD. It is crucial this setting matches your make and model

Now that you have the configuration files copied over, here comes the challenging part: making sure dependencies are met. The great part about this is that platformio takes care of installing the files you need. You will need to change this section of the ini file to reflect your board:

[platformio]
src_dir      = Marlin
boards_dir   = buildroot/share/PlatformIO/boards
default_envs = mega2560
include_dir  = Marlin
extra_configs =
    Marlin/config.ini
    ini/avr.ini
    ini/due.ini
    ini/esp32.ini
    ini/features.ini
    ini/lpc176x.ini
    ini/native.ini
    ini/samd51.ini
    ini/stm32-common.ini
    ini/stm32f0.ini
    ini/stm32f1-maple.ini
    ini/stm32f1.ini
    ini/stm32f4.ini
    ini/stm32f7.ini
    ini/stm32h7.ini
    ini/stm32g0.ini
    ini/teensy.ini
    ini/renamed.ini