Scott Lahteine

In the Meltzone

Added 2023-11-04 05:15:58 +0000 UTC

In case you missed it, I was a guest with Tom and Stefan on The Meltzone Podcast a few months ago, talking about the future of Marlin Firmware in a world of fast and inexpensive proprietary Bambu printers and decent alternatives like RepRapFirmware and Klipper. A great conversation and a lot of fun.

Marlin 2.2 is just around the corner, with a whole new motion system and a huge number of improvements. There’s still a vast space for single-board printers, a vast RepRap community, and great alternative applications for Marlin, so the future of Marlin is assured!

Now my focus is on modernizing the codebase to make it simpler for contributors to understand and easier for vendors to adapt. I’m improving the Auto Build Marlin plugin and adding a tool to import your old configs, which addresses one of the main difficulties preventing users from upgrading. Of course, the project overall continues to evolve with lots of fixes, optimizations, new features, and UI improvements. I’m confident that 2.2 will the best version so far.

Older versions of Marlin now have “LTS” branches for long-term support. For example, lts-2.0.8 now has a Marlin 2.0.8.3 version patched to support the latest PlatformIO. These branches are for your convenience if you prefer to stick with an older version of Marlin that works fine for your needs. These branches are also meant to help vendors to update their Marlin forks so they continue to build with the latest toolchain.

I could go on for a while about all the great improvements coming soon, but I’ve got to get on with it! These config import scripts aren’t going to write themselves … yet!

🖖🏻 — Scott